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: 103376,d1df6bc3799debed X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Not intended for use in medical, Date: 1997/05/14 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 241480281 References: <3.0.32.19970423164855.00746db8@mail.4dcomm.com> <5kmek2$9re@bcrkh13.bnr.ca> Organization: New York University Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-05-14T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Jon said >Well, yes, but this is more an explanation based on a symptom. The >real real reason is that A68 used a real formal specification based on >W-grammars. If not the implementors, then certainly the joe-average >person looking into the language found this more or less impenetrable >=> can't understand what it is => no hope of understanding how to use >it => no desire to use it => no demand for it => no commercial >pressure for compilers. For the implementors, the formal report was great. I only wish that I had something that easy to follow precisely for other languages. True, there was a HUGE learning barrier, and only a few dozen people ever got to the point of really knowing this document well (I was one, but then I was chair of WG2.1, and chair of the Algol-68 mainteance committee for a while, so I should hope so :-) It was definitely NOT a document for beginners, or even reasonably experienced experts. But people did not learn Algol-68 from the RR anyway. They learned it, for example, from the very nice 70 page yellow book that came with the Algol-68R compiler -- an easy evening's read -- I only wish there were something equivalent for Ada ... But people do not really get interested in a language until there are implementations around, and implementations only appear if there are commercial interests in funding such implementations. Algol-68 was, as are most modern languages, not the kind of language that someone can write a compiler for in their spare time -- several tried and failed, although a couple of the non-funded compilers (algol-68S and algol-68C -- the latter from Steve Bourne of the Bourne shell -- that's why the Bourne shell is a68 like) were quite successful.