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: 101deb,495b037244521cf3 X-Google-Attributes: gid101deb,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,22b2c05a8088bbb2 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Leading zeros with Int_IO.Put()? Or another package? Date: 1996/11/19 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 197425145 references: <327FB8A3.745B@itg-sepg.logicon.com> <55ubsh$lh0$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <56bi13$3pa$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> <328A0DDD.94B@lmtas.lmco.com> <56rgou$r4k$1@goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au> organization: New York University newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.pl1 Date: 1996-11-19T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: 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*.