On Sep 3, 2:57 pm, James Harris <james.harri...@googlemail.com> wrote: > On 3 Sep, 14:26, Albert van der Horst <alb...@spenarnc.xs4all.nl> > wrote: > > > In article > > <6031ba08-08c8-416b-91db-ce8ff57ae...@w6g2000yqw.googlegroups.com>, > > James Harris <james.harri...@googlemail.com> wrote: > > <SNIP> > > > >So you are saying that Smalltalk has <base in decimal>r<number> where > > >r is presumably for radix? That's maybe best of all. It preserves the > > >syntactic requirement of starting a number with a digit and seems to > > >have greatest flexibility. Not sure how good it looks but it's > > >certainly not bad. > > > > 0xff & 0x0e | 0b1101 > > > 16rff & 16r0e | 2r1101 > > > >Hmm. Maybe a symbol would be better than a letter. > > > Like 0#ff 16#ff ? > > Yes, that looks better. > > > That is ALGOL68. It is incredible how many of it has become > > vindicated over time. (Yes, nineteen hundred sixty eight was > > the year that language was conceived.) > > Yes, and its predecessor Algol 60 was a masterful advance in > programming languages. It set up standards we still use today. c.f. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/C._A._R._Hoare#The_Emperor.27s_Old_Clothes
> > James However I don't recall Algol60 having Bin/Oct/Hex numeric literals. c.f. http://www.masswerk.at/algol60/report.htm And I am pretty sure that Algol60 had neither builtin byte operators (eg xor, shl/shr), nor a builtin ability to read nor printf oct/hex. Maybe these were in AlgolW or a Burroughs/Unisys dialect of Algol60? (FYI: AlgolW has been reincarnated by Glyn Webster with his worthy AlgolW to gcc 'C' translator. To be found at: http://www.jampan.co.nz/~glyn/) The lack input/output in Algol60 did mean you could never shoot yourself in the foot with true Algol60 c.f.: [http://www.toodarkpark.org/computers/humor/shoot-self-in-foot.html] >* Algol 58/60+ - shoot yourself in the foot with a Civil > War-era musket. The musket is aesthetically fascinating, > and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the > emergency room. >* Algol 60 - You spend hours trying to figure out how > to fire the gun because it has no provisions for input > or output. On the other hand compare: >* Algol 68 - You mildly deprocedure the gun, the bullet > gets firmly dereferenced, and your foot is strongly > coerced to void. (I do know Algol 68 has the builtin mode "BITS" with matching literals, casts, operators and input/output, cf: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Bitwise_operations#ALGOL_68 ) And in summary of 41 years of language advancement: >* Python - You shoot yourself in the foot and then brag > for hours about how much more elegantly you did it > than if you had been using C or (God forbid) Perl. N joy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
