Re: Superassemblers: was Dimensionality Checking

["Alexandre E. Kopilovitch" <aek@vib.usr.pu.ru>]

Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com> wrote:

>"Alexandre E. Kopilovitch" wrote:
>
>>   Now let's recall the fact that the Ada is not a problem-oriented language,
>> but rather a "superassembler". It intentionally and carefully avoids all
>> paradigms that aren't closely related to the real computer architectures or
>> to the general software engineering, even if those paradigms are heavily used
>> in some significant application area.
>
>How do you characterize problem-oriented from superassembler?
I don't think that there exists a characterization, which is good enough for
general audience, and at the same time short. Tell me the background and the
experience of the questioner, and I'll be able to give an answer.
  I hope that the following definition is sufficient for you: a language is
problem-oriented if it supports _directly_ the views and the methods which are
customary for the targeted problem area.

>Do  superassemblers include Java, C++, C#, COBOL, Fortran, and PL/I, and
>Eiffel?
In this list only C++ falls in that category.
  Java, as a language, does not deserve any comments. It is enough to point out,
that this rather modern language has no construct for enumeration. I'd say that
Java should be better called NetBasic.
  C# is too immature... but it surely is (and will be, as far as I understand)
platform-dependent. Its objects presume a quite strong (dynamic) support from
the underlying software platform. Therefore it can't be an assembler at all.
Perhaps I should be slightly more formal to avoid naive counter-arguments:
the characteristic features of the C# may be used effectively only with strong
dynamic support provided by the underlying software platform.
  Cobol and Fortran, those titans of the past, are quite different in respect
to the issue. Cobol was strongly problem-oriented language, but Fortran was
much closer to the (portable) assembler in the past. In fact, a mixture of the
Fortran and assembler code was the best cocktail for many things (in the past,
of course).
  PL/I is (was) certainly a problem-oriented language, although it tried to
embrace several broad apllication areas. I know well enough that the PL/I story
is quite controversial, but here I simply express my personal opinion.
  As for Eiffel, I do not know this language (I'm still in doubt, which book
about Eiffel is more suitable for me - I'm interested in that language, but
not in the associated methodology teachings). But all that I read/heard about
it suggests that Eiffel's author recognizes the general software engineering
as a separate problem in its own right, and focused his efforts on that problem.
Therefore I think that the Eiffel language probably is problem-oriented, although
the problem targeted does not belong to a particular application area.

>  Can we say that those that are not superassemblers inlcude Haskell,
>Lisp, APL,  Prolog, and OCAML?
I do not know Haskell and OCAML (although I hope to take a look at Haskell
eventually, mostly because the author of the good compression program bzip2
likes it very much and recommends it persuasively).
  As for the other languages in this list - Lisp, APL and Prolog, I think that
the proper answer should be cautious: they all have a chance to become a part
of some future superassembler, but certainly each of them isn't (and cannot
evolve into) a whole thing. This is especially true for the List and Prolog,
while APL is slightly more shifted towards the problem-orientation.

> And which ones are truly problem-oriented?
Cobol, Fortran, PL/I, APL, Prolog, Pascal, SmallTalk, Snobol...


Alexander Kopilovitch                      aek@vib.usr.pu.ru
Saint-Petersburg
Russia