Re: C/C++ programmer giving Ada95 a chance -- writing an emulator.

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <8buu98$j$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
  Jean-Marc Bourguet <bourguet@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <8bu375$2mh$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> > In article <8bt1vk$r0e$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
> > Jean-Marc Bourguet <bourguet@my-deja.com> wrote:
> > > dewar> (I am one of the peculiar people who learned
> > > dewar> most languages from their reference manuals,
including
> > COBOL
> > > dewar> and Algol-68)
> > >
> > > I do not know COBOL, but learning Algol-68 from the RM
does
> > impress
> > > me a lot. I can find my way in it, more or less easily,
but I
> > knew
> > > a good part of the language before opening the RM.
> >
> > If you can find your way in the Algol-68 report, you are
part
> > of a VERY small group of people in the world :-)
>
> And now I'll wonder if I've understood anything in the report
:-)


Well the dynamic semantics is not so bad, I actually often find
it much easier to read than the Ada RM (certainly than the Ada
95 RM). The static semantics is another matter. It is not that
the w grammars are inpenetrable, it is that they are code, and
completely uncommented code at that. I think a good set of
comments would make the W grammars much more accessible.

By the way, just so you know not everyone reacts like everyone
else, Jack Schwartz had a student (sorry name escapes me now)
who designed a language called GYVE for operating system
building. He loved the original Algol-68 report, and provided
a complete definition of GYVE in that style. Then the revised
Algol-68 report came out, with the major discovery of predicates
in the W grammars (that allow much clearer code by exploiting
the idea of preconditions which parse to null if true, and a
blind alley if false). The student was so impressed that he
completely *rewrote* the entire definition in the thesis to use
predicates :-)


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