Re: Not intended for use in medical,

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

Matthew said

<<"The real question is why [Algol-68] did not come into more widespread use,
and the answer here is simple enough: because it was not implemented widely
enough, or soon enough.  And the reason for that is that implementation was
too hard, and the reason for that was on account of a relatively small
number of troublespots, not inherently necessary for the basis principles
of the language and certainly not for its orthogonality.">>

quoting Charles. 


In reading the above paragraph, you need to put it into the right
perspective, which in this case is Algol-60. There is no question
that a minimal non-optimizing A68 compiler is hugely more difficult
to write than an A60 compiler, and as I noted in my previous note,
doomed efforts to  write quick-and-dirty compilers in people's
spare time. There were some funded university efforts in Europe, but
another factor was that here in the US, despite a lot of interest,
NSF has never been interested in funding what it sees as basically
engineering efforts -- and that has meant that compiler development
in universities here has floundered compared with the situation
in Europe (it is no accident that Algol-68R and Algol-68S both
came out of British universities). 

I actually disagree with Charles that the trouble spots were so significant.
I think it was more a matter of overall complexity than specific trouble
spots, but that's a disagreement of degree -- as with all languages, there
are trouble spots.

But say compared to Ada, where relatively few features dominate the
implementation complexity severely (generics, private, discriminants),
I think the situation in A68 is MUCH simpler and MUCH more uniform.

It is interesting that the trouble spots in Ada-95 are all Ada-83 things.
Tuck said to me once that the hard part of implementing Ada -95 was
Ada-83, and I know exactly what he means. For the most part, Ada 95 is not
significantly harder to implement than Ada 83. Probably finalization is
the one significant exception to this generalization.