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[166.170.39.247]) by smtp.gmail.com with ESMTPSA id bd8-20020a170902830800b0019cb6222698sm185532plb.266.2023.03.16.15.50.53 (version=TLS1_2 cipher=ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 bits=128/128); Thu, 16 Mar 2023 15:50:53 -0700 (PDT) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Mime-Version: 1.0 (Mac OS X Mail 16.0 \(3731.400.51.1.1\)) From: Bakul Shah In-Reply-To: <20230315035930.C68E018C080@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2023 15:50:42 -0700 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Message-Id: <142EE114-4273-4DE9-A533-F3C08F5E1D26@iitbombay.org> References: <20230315035930.C68E018C080@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> To: Noel Chiappa X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.3731.400.51.1.1) Message-ID-Hash: WSY7DHOHFMHGNIDYG4EIGK4E4EJ2NPNV X-Message-ID-Hash: WSY7DHOHFMHGNIDYG4EIGK4E4EJ2NPNV X-MailFrom: bakul@iitbombay.org X-Mailman-Rule-Misses: dmarc-mitigation; no-senders; approved; emergency; loop; banned-address; member-moderation; nonmember-moderation; administrivia; implicit-dest; max-recipients; max-size; news-moderation; no-subject; digests; suspicious-header CC: tuhs@tuhs.org X-Mailman-Version: 3.3.6b1 Precedence: list Subject: [TUHS] Re: [TUHS]: C dialects (was: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary) List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list Archived-At: List-Archive: List-Help: List-Owner: List-Post: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: On Mar 14, 2023, at 8:59 PM, Noel Chiappa = wrote: >=20 >> From: Bakul Shah >=20 >> In hindsight Algol68 may have been the last committee designed = language >> that was good. >=20 > 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.