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Re: [colorforth] Hello - and where to begin?


"M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@xxxxxxxxxxx> said:
Well ... I've always thought there really were only three innovative languages -- Lisp, APL and Forth. I view Haskell, ML, Prolog, Erlang, and all the other functional languages as specialized dialects of Lisp.

What you take as baseline determines what is innovative.

FORTRAN was, without a doubt, innovative, when it came out.

ALGOL was certainly innovative. PASCAL was arguably innovative, in that it provided a real data structuring facility, combined with strong typing, AND it was designed to be compiled and linked in ONE PASS.

I would argue that C was not particularly innovative: almost everything it provided was already available in other languages. (The exception, the glorification of pointer arithmetic, is a misfeature, in my opinion.)


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