re: Default Default

[Colin . Runciman]

I agree with John P.

A memorable phrase from the opening of Backus's celebrated 1978 diatribe
(Can Programming be Liberated ...) was his dismayed reference to the
`primitive word-at-a-time style' of conventional programming languages
of the day, too much influenced by the architectural peculiarities
of machines.

Twenty years later, must we really settle for primitive modulo-word-size
arithmetic as the default?

Colin R