Re: Interesting article on ARG work

["Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Tuesday, April 3, 2018 at 5:33:47 PM UTC-5, Randy Brukardt wrote:
> I'm not sure what your idea is. The pragma Assert exists already, what is it 
> that you can't do with it that you need?
> 
>                        Randy.
> 
> "Bojan Bozovic" wrote in message 
> > Pragma assert(condition,message);
> > Construct
> > Assertion name is condition with message;

Randy, despite your humor in the original posting, I think that he is (seriously) proposing that assertions optionally be named so that the named condition and message pair is defined in one place and then utilized at the (numerous) places where the assertion appears, so that the condition & message do not vary due to the drift of time, forgetfulness, and whim of different programmers.  Something to the effect of:

in spec:
ASSERTION MyAssertion IS conditionExpressionOrName WITH messageStringLiteralOrName;

elsewhere, potentially numerous times:
PRAGMA ASSERT( MyAssertion );

Bojan, blackhole is not an actual feature (nor is Munificent Vigil an actual programming language).  Look at the 01 April 2018 date of posting.  As a language principle of permitting everything to be declared with a name and then utilized by mentioning the name to assure uniformity at all points of utilization, your idea is neither humorous nor ridiculous, even though it is in reply to a joke.  You actually imply one of my criticisms of Ada:  there is no MetaAda that declares all language principles (preferably in code that compiler vendors would take as input when writing a compiler, instead of taking in English prose).  “Everything shall be able to be named; that name shall be utilizable to assure uniformity at each point of usage to the named declaration.” would be one of those statements in MetaAda, most likely stated in something resembling a language isomorphic to symbolic logic instead of quick-&-dirty English prose here.

(It is actually my criticism of all programming languages, but in all these decades & decades Ada is the only one to have come the closest so far to obeying a MetaAda-that-was-never-codified by mere habit of self-discipline of its designers.  Only Algol68 attempted something even remotely in this category of what I call MetaAda here but unfortunately Algol68's designers chose cryptic van Wijngaarden 2-level grammar as the mode of bizarre [partial] expression of codifying the syntax & semantics of the language—and then not for the purpose of overarching story-arc big-picture principles.  I suppose that I should give a nod to Perl6's Parrot too, but Parrot's purpose seems drastically different, but perhaps that is merely my shallow understanding of Parrot showing there.)