John Backus (the 'B' of BNF) said the following about the development of Fortan I. All I can say is that I agree some 2 or 300%:
"It was our belief that if Fortran, during its first months, were to translate any reasonable 'scientific' program into an object program only half as fast as its hand-coded counterpart, then acceptance of our system would be in serious danger...To this day I believe that our emphasis on object program efficiency was basically correct... ...I believe we are in a similar, but unrecognized, situation today: in spite of all the fuss that has been made ove4ry myriad language details, current conventional languages are still very weak programming aids, and far more powerful programs would be in use today if anyone had found a way to make them run with adequate efficiency. (J. Backus, "The history of Fortran I, II and III", ACM SIGLAN Notices 13(8):165-180, August 1978) In spite of all the advances in programming languages since then (not to mention middleware, database technology, and so forth), I think he is absolutely right. === Gregory Woodhouse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "Design quality doesn't ensure success, but design failure can ensure failure." --Kent Beck ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Discover Easy Linux Migration Strategies from IBM. Find simple to follow Roadmaps, straightforward articles, informative Webcasts and more! Get everything you need to get up to speed, fast. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7477&alloc_id=16492&op=click _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
