[TUHS] Re: [TUHS]: C dialects (was: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary)

[Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org>]

On Mar 14, 2023, at 8:59 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
> 
>> From: Bakul Shah
> 
>> In hindsight Algol68 may have been the last committee designed language
>> that was good.
> 
> I do not grant your basic assertion. Hoare had it right: "ALGOL 60 [was] a
> language so far ahead of its time that it was not only an improvement on its
> predecessors but also on nearly all its successors." That would definitely
> include Algol68, which was a classic committee-designed nightmare.

You have to realize that even top-notch computer scientists
like Hoare, Dijkstra are/were still people just like us
and have their own biases! And the context matters.

The a68 fights were before my time. I learned about it at grad
school on my own and at the time I had no preconceptions about
it (or for that matter any other language).  Reading the
Algol68 Revised Report was hard but all became clear when I
read an introductory book by Brailsford and Walker, and
another by Pagan. I liked a68's uniform syntax and semantics
very much, in spite of surface syntax issues like DO .. OD. I
just think it got a very bad rap due to personalities, the
language of report itself, the strong opinions of its language
committee, the state of art computers at the time etc. etc.
Today it seems like a smaller language than today's C++, Rust,
Swift etc. If I were to write as many lines of code in it as I
have in C++, possibly I may dislike it but probably not as
much as C++.

Cowan made a point that CL is a committee designed language
that is "not a nightmare". I agree. I missed noting that.