Re: [Ada] made me hate programming

[Kulin Remailer <remailer@reece.net.au>]

> I remember this when I was young. For some reason, students 
> get real hung up on compile time errors.  It's like they are
> horses bouncing around inside the gate, waiting for the door
> to open. 

That was the questionable thinking behind a hilarious variant of PL/I
called PL/C, Cornell University's PL/I compiler. Students just want their
programs to compile and run, don't bother them with details like whether
it's correct or not. Not a good assumption but...it was enough for somebody
or some group of people to put out a pretty interesting compiler and get it
out there in academia, circa late 70s early 80s timeframe.

The purpose of PL/C was to take almost any input and hammer it until it
looked like a PL/I program, compile it, and generate an executable from
it. It certainly may not do what you intended, but by george, the damn
thing will almost always start running. What happens next...nobody knows. 

It was hysterical to look closely at the diagnostics. I don't have a
listing handy but I remember it would be something like

Error on line ... (note the syntax error)
PL/C uses ....    (what PL/C replaced your erroneous statement with)

If I had a dime for every cup of coffee that went out my nose working with
that compiler! Actually it could have been a very interesting aspect of AI
if they had intentions in that direction but I don't think it went any
further and I haven't seen anything like it since.