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

On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 01:12:10PM -0600, John R. Strohm wrote:
> "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.)

My favorite is still Algol 68, because it was the first unification of
all that was known and made sense. It is amazing what was all already in
there, and how you could extend the language (e.g. basing complex
numbers on reals, and you couldn't tell it wasn't a build in type)
E.g. your pointer arithmetic could be done in Algol 68 with a small
preambule. ( *pc++ would be .pd. pc where .pd. is a new bold word, like
meaning "post incremented dereference" ). It is theoretically sound in
the extreme, it caused a riot when after a few years a single ambiguity
was discovered.
What is unique to C is the unsafeness of its pointer arithmetic, and the
misfeature of a trailing unary operator (++ , --) as a unique language
syntax exception. And of course the miserable declaration syntax.

What makes a great language is the balance. Algol 68 and Python.
Then there are work horses. C++ and Forth and macro assembler.

Groetjes Albert

--
Albert van der Horst, UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
Economic growth -- like all pyramid schemes -- ultimately falters.
albert@spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst

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