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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Build language with weak typing,
 then add scaffolding later to strengthen it?
Date: Fri, 29 May 2015 16:51:39 -0500
Organization: Jacob Sparre Andersen Research & Innovation
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Date: 2015-05-29T16:51:39-05:00
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<Stefan.Lucks@uni-weimar.de> wrote in message 
news:alpine.DEB.2.11.1505291006310.28509@debian...
>On Thu, 28 May 2015, Randy Brukardt wrote:

>> So now we're at 228 pages. With some reformatting, and removing all of 
>> the
>> introductory text, notes, and examples, we'd save at least 20% of that
>> (probably more). So that means that an equivalently formatted Ada 
>> standard
>> would probably be roughly 180 pages (or maybe 270 if we left everything 
>> in).
>
>Actually, you could get away with significantly less (I'd say, less than
>100 pages) if you rewrote the manual in an Oberon-like (or Wirthian)
>style, i.e., a manual that tells the programmer what he or she needs to
>know, but leaves plenty of details unspecified which the compiler writer
>would need to know.

Which only works if there is never going to be more than one compiler (i.e. 
Oberon, Eiffel). Otherwise, it will eventually be a disaster, or the details 
will get filled in, or both.

...
>> And, of course, Wirth himself has a long history of writing sloppy 
>> language
>> standards and leaving when other people try to clean them up (Algol-W,
>> Pascal, Modula, Modula 2, ...). He's a brilliant language designer, but 
>> he
>> always has underdescribed standards. (That surely includes building
>> standards without any library description, which is nonsense for any
>> purpose.)
>
>Now *that* is unfair to Wirth! (Not the part with the brilliant language
>designer, but the other part.)

Not really. He complained about other people's language designs not being 
precise (in his Turing Award speech in particular vis-a-vis PL/I), but his 
don't seem to need the same amount of detail. I call BS on that.

                                   Randy.