Re: Alternatives to C: ObjectPascal, Eiffel, Ada or Modula-3?

["bartc" <bartc@freeuk.com>]

"Andrew Reilly" <andrew-newspost@areilly.bpc-users.org> wrote in message 
news:7d20p0F29q0dnU1@mid.individual.net...
> On Sat, 25 Jul 2009 22:10:03 -0400, wwilson wrote:
>
>> One thing that made a difference is that some of the common languaages
>> of that era were designed so that the compiler could determine the kind
>> of statement from the first two or three letters of the statement.  Both
>> FORTRAN and the early BASICs were this way.  At this point the compiler
>> jumped to a statement specific translation.  No LL(1), parse tables, or
>> other more powerful techniques needed.  Not that I would give up the
>> language advantages that these techniques allow.  There is no free lunch
>> and, IMHO, many newer language features justify all the extra power that
>> is necessry to compile them.
>
> A comment of Bertrand Meyer's that I remember reading, and agreeing with
> whole-heartedly, is that computers exist to do work, and the more of our
> (menial) work that we (as programmers) can get them to do for us, the
> better off we'll be.

My desktop pc is probably some 1000-10000 times more powerful than the 
computer I used at college with it's 200 simultaneous users.

And what does it spend it's time doing? Probably 99% of the time waiting for 
me to hit a key or pushing a mouse cursor around. 1% of the time doing 
actual work: downloading an email or web page (which could probably be done 
by a dedicated chip)!

So yes it is taking this menial work extremely seriously. No wonder software 
and languages are so bloated, to keep computers busy. Shame it also makes 
them overcomplex for people to use.

> I do remember loading compilers from tape into 16k-bytes of RAM, too.
> Yes, it was neat that that was possible, and there are certainly
> important classes of computers that have no more memory than that, today,
> but we don't generally ask them to run compilations for us...

I've created a compiler in, not 16K, but 32K, and it's not a big deal. Sure 
a bit more memory would have helped, but the gigabytes available now is a 
complete joke.

-- 
bartc