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From: Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Build language with weak typing, then add scaffolding later to
 strengthen it?
Date: Sat, 30 May 2015 11:10:16 +0200
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Date: 2015-05-30T11:10:16+02:00
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On 30.05.15 01:12, Peter Chapin wrote:
> Now they are stuck with maintaining two incompatible versions of the language into the arbitrary future.

Ruby and Perl got stuck too, here and there. One of the causes being
when their string type was relying on C's char.  At some point, the
eighth's bit became meaningful, encoding and better types needing
support in the language. (Just consider C's 127 + 1 if CHAR_BIT is 8,
and dynamically linked libraries being used.)  One effect on Python
is that programmers cannot easily use many libraries that were built
with 7 bit I/O in mind.

Python's creator Guido van Rossum has left Google, so maybe Google
will use their own Go language now, Python loosing a sponsor.


 From the technical point of view:

    12345.67e9

does not make a programmer think about encoding of numeric literals,
does it? Whereas "π" does, in all sorts of ways. While programmers do
need numbers all the time, the same is perhaps not true about text.

So, possibly computer scientists have created a huge language problem
by building on the assumption that "text stuff", rarely needed as it
is, is just like numeric literals.

    But "'A'" /= "65 ". Dammit!