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: 241508268 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: 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.