Interesting quote

Interesting quote

[J-P. Rosen]

While browsing through some old papers, I came across this. Couldn't
resist to share...

--------------------->8---------------------------------------

Other languages were considered for formal evaluation, but were not
included because preliminary examination led one to believe that they
would not meet the requirements so were not viable candidates for the
purposes of the DoD.

One such language was C.  At that time DARPA was working with Western
Electric/Bell Labs on UNIX, contractually supporting some DARPA
contractors and other government facilities using UNIX. It was the
evaluation policy to have the owners provide assessments of their own
languages, in addition to the contracted evaluations, so HOLWG took
advantage of this connection between DARPA and Bell Labs to request
their cooperation. When Bell Labs were invited to evaluate C against the
DoD requirements, they said that there was no chance of C meeting the
requirements of readability, safety, etc. for which we were striving,
and that it should not even be on the list of evaluated languages.

We recognized the truth in their observation and honored their request.

William Whitaker
"Ada-The Project: The DoD HighOrder Language Working Group"
ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 28, No. 3 (March 1993), p. 31.

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------
           J-P. Rosen (rosen@adalog.fr)
Visit Adalog's web site at http://www.adalog.fr

Re: Interesting quote

[Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)]

Le Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:24:47 +0200, J-P. Rosen <rosen@adalog.fr> a écrit:
> they said that there was no chance of C meeting the
> requirements of readability, safety, etc. for which we were striving,
> and that it should not even be on the list of evaluated languages.
>
> We recognized the truth in their observation and honored their request.
>
> William Whitaker

Ouch, that's violent 8-|

Thanks for sharing memory