From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.7 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,MSGID_RANDY autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,fca456da8e6ec463 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-01-29 22:30:06 PST Path: supernews.google.com!sn-xit-02!sn-xit-04!supernews.com!feed.textport.net!hammer.uoregon.edu!arclight.uoregon.edu!newsfeed.mathworks.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!nntp2.deja.com!nnrp1.deja.com!not-for-mail From: Robert Dewar Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Latin, Shakespeare, and other irrelevant topics Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2001 06:15:15 GMT Organization: Deja.com Message-ID: <955m5h$brm$1@nnrp1.deja.com> References: <94p9fl$a1g$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <94qbb4$bs1$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <94rkj1$d4r$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <87k87i2ha7.fsf@deneb.enyo.de> <94vnup$kia$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <952hmb$niq$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <95315u$3ca$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <954e7d$8q61@news.cis.okstate.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: 205.232.38.14 X-Article-Creation-Date: Tue Jan 30 06:15:15 2001 GMT X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.61 [en] (OS/2; U) X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x52.deja.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 205.232.38.14 X-MyDeja-Info: XMYDJUIDrobert_dewar Xref: supernews.google.com comp.lang.ada:4684 Date: 2001-01-30T06:15:15+00:00 List-Id: In article <954e7d$8q61@news.cis.okstate.edu>, dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org wrote: >. If you require someone to know a language inside > and out before having an opinion on it, only the people who will have > an opinion on it are those who love it enough to spend all that time > learning it. You do not have to "love" a language to spend time learning it. Indeed the idea of expending such a deep emotion as love on some technical artifical language is a bit sad .... If have NOT learned a language, then you don't know it. If you don't know it, then you really can't comment on it in an informed manner, and what happens is that people tend to borrow their pseudo-opinions from what they have heard. So for example, lots of people will dismiss COBOL as too verbose, which overall is plain technical nonsense (when I gave a talk at Berkeley on COBOL, I spent time addressing this silly issue just because so many people are under this illusion -- we took several standard algorithms, and programmed them in several languages, and COBOL came out as short or shorter than the competition, both in characters and token count :-) Of course this is a totally uninteresting issue anyway, and has nothing to do with the things that make COBOL an interesting language :-) With regard to assembly language, you cannot have an opinion on AL from a language point of view unless you have reasonable working knowledge of an AL. It is really a rule of all honest intellectual approaches that you cannot offer opinions on things you don't know about. If you have not read Dickens, then you do NOT go selling other's opinions of Dickens as though they were your own! Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/