Re: 30 Years

[cis.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu !vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!uchinews!att-out!cbnewsl!willett@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (davi]

>From article <9308251529.AA07664@manta.nosc.mil>, by mshapiro@MANTA.NOSC.MIL (
Michael D Shapiro):
> In INFO-ADA Digest V93 #560m Bob (so what happened to Paramax?) Munck
>      {munck@STARS.Reston.Paramax.COM} wrote:

	{Much deletion}
> 
> Probably what we should really hope that someone is looking for the
> successor to Ada and C++ and {insert your other favorite language here}
> that takes the most appropriate properties of each and combines them
> into a new tailorable language.  As I see it, this language should have
> multiple formality levels.  High formality would be required for huge
> systems.  Informality would be allowed for throwaway programs.
> In-between systems would need to conform to some intermediate formality
> levels.

Why do you think we need a "one-language-fits-all" solution?  In a previous
long-term (>30 year) project, we used two languages:

	HP's Rocky Mountain Basic for rapid prototyping

	Fortran for production code

Flame all you wish, but we were a collection of legacy systems that were
"protected" from the mandate.  I thought that environment worked very
well, largely because Rocky Mountain Basic (circa 1975) was a "Fortranized" 
dialect of Basic.  This made conversion into production code much easier.

We had the best of both worlds.  We could "run a solution up the flagpole"
with a quickie Basic prototype, and if "someone saluted" we could efficiently
recode the algorithm into Fortran.  If it turned out that the program was 
not that useful, we could trash the prototype or reuse pieces to solve 
other problems.

I found that I did just a bit more than half of my coding in Basic because
we wrote more throwaway stuff than production stuff.


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Dave Willett          AT&T Federal Systems Advanced Technologies

The biggest mistake you can make is to believe that you work for someone else.
			
			-- Anonymous