Re: [colorforth] Hello - and where to begin?
- Subject: Re: [colorforth] Hello - and where to begin?
- From: "John R. Strohm" <strohm@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2008 13:12:10 -0600
"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.)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: colorforth-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: colorforth-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Main web page - http://www.colorforth.com