On Thu, May 9, 2024, 6:10 PM Paul Koning via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> > > > On May 9, 2024, at 7:55 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> > wrote: > > > >>> ... > >>> I've written code in Pascal, as well as Modula-2. Never liked > >>> it--seemed to be a bit awkward for the low-level stuff that I was > doing. > > > > On Thu, 9 May 2024, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: > >> Not surprising, since that's not what it is all about. Both, like > their predecessor ALGOL-60 as well as successors like Ada, are strongly > typed languages where doing unsafe stuff is made very hard. Contrast that > with C, which sets out to make it easy to do unsafe things and partly for > that reason has a feeble type system. So doing low level stuff like device > drivers is difficult, unless you create extensions to break out of the type > system. An example of how to do that is the Burroughs extension of ALGOL > called ESPOL, which is what they used to write the OS. Actually, Burroughs > did a number of extended versions for different purposes; there's also > DCALGOL (Data comm ALGOL) intended for writing communications software. > Why that's separate from ESPOL I don't really know; I only ever got to do > regular ALGOL programming on Burroughs mainframes. One reason for that: > those systems depend on the compilers for their security; if ordinary users > got access to ESPOL they could write dangerous code, but in ALGOL they > cannot. > > > > One of the things that _I_ love about C is that it is easy to get it out > of the way when you want to do something lower level. > > > > Rather than feeble type system, it could have had a requirement to > explicitly "cast" anything being used as a "wrong" type. > > > > One of Alan Holub's books about C is titled > > "Enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot" > > True, and Stroustrup added that "and C++ is a cannon that blows off your > entire leg". > The other joke is that C++ lets you shoot off the 27 identical legs you didn't know you had... Warner > Each language has its own specialty. And you need to find the one that > fits you best. > > > > It used to be (and likely still is), that every computer science grad > student created a new language. A requirement (usually UNSPOKEN) was that > the compiler be able to compile itself. That the language compiler is > written (actually normally RE-written) in that language and compiled by > that compiler. That certainly seems to bias things towards languages that > are well suited for writing compilers! If you were to create a language > that was specializzed for something completely different, and poorly suited > for writing compilers, then it would not be respected. > > If you don't mind the total lack of protection, FORTH is very nice: it > even more easily than C lets you do low level things, and it is also very > small. And the implementation is by definition entirely extensible. A > large FORTH program I wrote in the 1980s, on PDP-11 FORTH, starts out by > redefining the language as a 32-bit version. > > I still remember a classmate of mine, who told me when we were both at DEC > that he had written an expression parser in COBOL. I think he also tried > to do one in RPG but found it was too hard. > > paul > >
