Re: Leading zeros with Int_IO.Put()? Or another package?

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

robin said

"No excuse for having everyone who wants to use such a facility
to have to write it."

Ah, yes, the design principle that PL1 made famous, or rather infamous.
If something is useful, pop it in, after all, you don't have to use it
if you don't want to. 

Part of the trouble with this philosophy, which is characteristic of
committee designed languages (unlike Ada, PL/1 was very much a committee
designed language, trying to meet the requirements of many dissimilar
constituencies), is that it is quite difficult to get implementations
to handle simple cases efficiently. PL/1 was, compared to IBM's expectations,
a dismal failure, and in particular, the very public abandonment of PL/1
by early adopters, notably Sears, was not so much a reaction to the language,
which is, as I have noted before, not as bad as people think, but rather
a reaction to the implementation quality.

Now it is true that part of the implementation problems were due to what
is now generally perceived as fundamental mistakes in the PL/1 design
(e.g. far too many implicit conversions permitted), but they were much
more due to simple size and complexity. Of course over time, the compilers
did improve, but too late to avoid the initial bad publicity.

Acceptance of languages is always based as much on initial implementations
as it is on the language itself. Algol-68 was quite successful in the
few environments in which decent compilers were available (notably the
Algol68-R compiler on ICL machines in the UK), but in most environments,
no decent compilers were available.

Certainly you can see a parallel in the Ada world, there is no question
that the acceptance of ada 83 was influenced by the quality and
availability of compilers early on, and even today you see people making
unfounded statements about Ada the *language*, based on their early
experience with Ada *compilers*.