Re: newbie can't get exceptions to work!

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Robert A Duff wrote:
> Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> writes:
> 
> > On Sat, 7 Apr 2001, Robert A Duff wrote:
> > > I suspect that to make a *popular* language these days, you have to make
> > > it look like C (yuck), 
> > 
> > Python isn't popular? Visual Basic? 
> 
> Granted.  And Lisp and Smalltalk are still popular in in their niche.
> And Perl is popular, though I find it an abomination.
> 
> > I don't think you need to go quite as far as Cyclone. Dump "begin end" and
> > use "{ }".
> 
> Well, it's not just "begin end", but also "if ... end if", "procedure P
> ... end P", and so forth.
> 
> Anyway, I like being able to see what the "end" is end of (as in "end
> if" or "end P"), so I don't like just "}".

Right, I responded in another post that this is a good thing. If we keep 
Ada's approach to semi-colons then we can easily keep those trailing
names. Incidentally, I hate the optional {} on if rule of C, and I always
found Ada's semi-colon as terminator rule easy. I realize that's another 
flamewar, but I'm just shooting out an opinion.

> >... If you keep the procedure/function distinction, use shorter
> > names.
> 
> I would call them both "procedure".  I find the C syntax for functions
> very unreadable -- it's hard to tell a procedure header from an
> expression.

I agree, but since you proposed going C like, let's go for shorter names,
like proc. And no "returns" either, let's regress to a Pascalish :.

> >... Use [] for arrays.
> 
> Agreed.
> 
> > Use Pascal notation for pointers.
> 
> Yes!  I hate ".all", and I long for the days of "X^.Y".

Phew. Good that we're getting some agreement. 

> >... Provide some 
> > shortcut operators like C.
> 
> OK, but I might decide to call it Incr(X) instead X++.

OK. I think C folks will whine though. I have a generic package for these
in Ada, and I use Incr and Decr. 

> >... Keep Ada's modes. OK, so the language may look
> > a bit different from Ada syntactically but I think it could stay in the
> > spirit of Ada semantically. 
> > 
> > > and you have to have enough money to generate large amounts of hype.  Sigh.
> > 
> > It's not clear to me that that approach is such a win. There is something
> > of a Java backlash too.
> 
> If I could design a language that inspired as much backlash as Java,
> I would consider myself quite a success!

:-). 

I think if the language could generate code as good as C, and be at a
significantly higher level, you might get some interest. IMO, the
important thing is to have a good compiler that runs on lots of machines. 
A simple command line job, no point in wasting time with an IDE until 
enough folks are interested. 

Anyways, Python, Tcl, Ruby and others didn't have large marketing budgets. 

-- Brian