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From: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
To: Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com>
Cc: Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com>, TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: [TUHS] Re: [TUHS]: C dialects (was: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary)
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2023 20:38:09 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAD2gp_Q46vh6-mvOyr1=Ke1-eUYg9KLrUa_bFUnsFS92LAf_Jg@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CABH=_VRGTRpGts=zratgR+ugs_eJo8iuZyWss8tZdDDVDRV6Qw@mail.gmail.com>

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On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 5:00 PM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com>
wrote:

Dropping toxic features from a language does happen at standards
> committees, but it's rare.  The best case I know of where this
> happened was when the international standard for PL/I came out.  They
> started with IBM PL/I but then dropped a bunch of features that were
> either obsolete (e.g., sterling pictures) or downright dangerous
> (e.g., the DEFAULT statement).
>

That actually happened twice.  The 1976 standard removed features from IBM
PL/I; the 1981 Subset G standard removed even more features.  (A few were
added back in the 1987 revision of Subset G.)

> On the other side of the spectrum you have the BASIC standards
> committee.  BASIC has always had to live down a reputation that it's a
> "toy language" not suitable for "serious programming".  The standards
> committee seems to have suffered from an inferiority complex, and it
> seemed from my perspective that as fast as the PL/I committee chucked
> out toxic language, the BASIC committee adopted them.


There are two Basic standards as well: the smaller one came first.

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  parent reply	other threads:[~2023-03-14  0:38 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 44+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2023-03-10 11:37 [TUHS] Re: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary Noel Chiappa
2023-03-10 11:51 ` [TUHS] Conditions, AKA exceptions. (Was: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary) Ralph Corderoy
2023-03-10 15:54 ` [TUHS] Re: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary Dan Cross
2023-03-12  7:39   ` Anthony Martin
2023-03-12 11:40     ` Dan Cross
2023-03-12 16:40       ` Paul Winalski
2023-03-13  3:25       ` John Cowan
2023-03-13 10:40         ` Alejandro Colomar (man-pages)
2023-03-13 12:19           ` Dan Cross
2023-03-13 12:43             ` [TUHS] [TUHS]: C dialects (was: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary) Alejandro Colomar
2023-03-13 12:46               ` [TUHS] " Dan Cross
2023-03-13 16:00               ` Paul Winalski
2023-03-13 19:00                 ` Clem Cole
2023-03-13 19:09                   ` Larry McVoy
2023-03-13 19:17                   ` Steve Nickolas
2023-03-13 20:26                     ` Dan Cross
2023-03-13 22:25                       ` Alejandro Colomar (man-pages)
2023-03-13 19:24                   ` [TUHS] Re: [TUHS]: C dialects Luther Johnson
2023-03-13 19:38                     ` Luther Johnson
2023-03-14 19:48                     ` John Cowan
2023-03-14 19:56                       ` Joseph Holsten
2023-03-14 20:01                       ` Luther Johnson
2023-03-13 20:48                   ` [TUHS] Re: [TUHS]: C dialects (was: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary) Paul Winalski
2023-03-13 20:56                     ` Bakul Shah
2023-03-14  1:06                     ` Larry McVoy
2023-03-13 21:00                   ` Paul Winalski
2023-03-13 21:07                     ` Bakul Shah
2023-03-13 21:14                       ` Dan Cross
2023-03-13 22:15                         ` Dave Horsfall
2023-03-13 22:47                           ` Dave Horsfall
2023-03-14  0:23                             ` Dan Cross
2023-03-14  0:21                           ` Dan Cross
2023-03-14 13:52                             ` Chet Ramey
2023-03-14  1:27                         ` Bakul Shah
2023-03-13 21:28                       ` Paul Winalski
2023-03-14 10:04                       ` [TUHS] C dialects Ralph Corderoy
2023-03-14 20:02                         ` [TUHS] " John Cowan
2023-03-14 21:34                           ` Thomas Paulsen
2023-03-14  0:38                     ` John Cowan [this message]
2023-03-14  2:49                 ` [TUHS] Re: [TUHS]: C dialects (was: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary) Theodore Ts'o
2023-03-14  3:06                   ` G. Branden Robinson
2023-03-15  3:59 Noel Chiappa
2023-03-15  4:33 ` John Cowan
2023-03-16 22:50 ` Bakul Shah

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