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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: f43e6,5ac12f5a60b1bfe X-Google-Attributes: gidf43e6,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,5ac12f5a60b1bfe X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 101deb,87f6968ed41c9df1 X-Google-Attributes: gid101deb,public From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Multiple reasons for failure of Ariane 5 (was: Re: Ariane 5 - not an exception?) Date: 1996/08/11 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 173527144 references: <4ta0iu$kks@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <4u538f$9q6@hacgate2.hac.com> <4u6723$kp2@piglet.cc.uic.edu> <4uibvh$1p76@news-s01.ny.us.ibm.net> organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences newsgroups: comp.software-eng,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.pl1 Date: 1996-08-11T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Dave said "What do you think PL/I has been doing these past 30 years? High-precision decimal arithmetic, with "all the bells and whistles" edit patterns. It was always a better COBOL than COBOL, and far more coherently structured." Yes indeed, I completely overlooked PL/I, which of course has been around a long time, and has not succeeded in displacing COBOL, even though it is arguably better, although by modern standards its type system is rusty. Is there a more modern version of PL/1, my knowledge really stops with the (original) ANSI standard, and if there is a new standard I had not heard of it. To compete with OOCOBOL, you clearly need a language with powerful abstraction facilities, and it was really that that I was thinking about. Type abstraction, type extension, inheritance, polymorphism and strong typing with named types seem pretty essential these days. As I say, for all I know there is a wonderful OO-PL/I available that I am unfamiliar with :-) I guess the reason PL/I escaped my attention is precisely that it has been around so long :-)