Timeline for Was Dennis Ritchie being too modest in this quote about C and Pascal?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
17 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 29, 2019 at 9:34 | comment | added | Stephen Kitt | @DrSheldon indeed, I’ve tried to address that in my update. | |
| Apr 29, 2019 at 9:34 | history | edited | Stephen Kitt | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Include shell and AWK.
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| Apr 27, 2019 at 12:23 | comment | added | DrSheldon | I appreciate that you've listed the descendants. However, you completely missed the various scripting languages which have descended from C. By 1993, this included C shell, ksh, tcsh, awk, and Perl. | |
| Apr 26, 2019 at 12:42 | vote | accept | DrSheldon | ||
| Apr 25, 2019 at 16:43 | comment | added | Maury Markowitz | Hoar's quote is best "There are two ways of constructing a software design: one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." | |
| Apr 25, 2019 at 16:35 | comment | added | Maury Markowitz | Algol68 was widely used as the canonical example of second-system-effect in the 1970s. It was in all the language design books of the era. It added all sorts of huge distributed costs to implement features that no one actually used, yet left many of the original implementation problems from earlier versions unsolved. But all my refs are dead tree, but looking in Google Books you can find many comments as to its sheer size and complexity. | |
| Apr 25, 2019 at 14:26 | comment | added | TripeHound | @another-dave Yes, the "slim volume" was the manual for the ICL1900 (I was actually using a 290x but from what I remember it was mostly pretending to be a 190x). | |
| Apr 25, 2019 at 14:19 | comment | added | dave | @Tripehound - the problem with the Algol68 Report was that it used a new two-level grammar in a difficult way. The Revised Report redid the grammar in a cleaner way but it was still relatively complex for the time. Would the "slim book" you refer to be the Algol 68R User's Manual for ICL1900? That's very simple but is not the defining document. Slightly more precise (but still not the official definition) is Lindsey/van Der Meulen's Informal Introduction to Algol 68, which I rate extremely highly. | |
| Apr 25, 2019 at 13:58 | comment | added | TripeHound | @StephenKitt Thanks for the link... I'll have a dig. From memory (I dabbled with Algol68 about 35 years ago, and quite liked it), the definition of the language was a fairly slim (¼"?) book and I don't remember it being unreadable... | |
| Apr 25, 2019 at 13:54 | comment | added | Stephen Kitt | @TripeHound the Lindsey paper covers the debacle in detail. To give you an idea, it introduction starts with “The World seems to have a rather negative perception of ALGOL 68. The language has been said to be “too big”, to be defined by an “unreadable Report” produced by a committee which “broke up in disarray”, to have no implementations, and to have no users.” (The paper does try to redeem the language.) | |
| Apr 25, 2019 at 13:34 | comment | added | TripeHound | @MauryMarkowitz Since comments are probably not the appropriate medium, do you have any links that expand on what "the debacle of Algol68" was? (A quick Google search only threw up this answer on StackOverflow which only mentions the debacle but has no links (other than being somewhere in "the ACM History of Programming Languages conference papers"). | |
| Apr 25, 2019 at 13:14 | comment | added | Stephen Kitt | @Maury basing the discussion on Algol makes it harder to create an artificial distinction between C and Pascal ;-). | |
| Apr 25, 2019 at 10:33 | comment | added | Maury Markowitz | I think it is much more accurate to say that Algol was the root of these languages, not Pascal. Pascal was largely created to be a better Algol after the debacle of Algol68, and there were a wide variety of other spin-offs that were in widespread use at the time - JOVIAL being an obvious example. | |
| Apr 25, 2019 at 8:06 | history | edited | Stephen Kitt | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Link the genealogical tree project.
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| Apr 25, 2019 at 7:56 | comment | added | TripeHound | There's a nice quote about Wirth's intentions behind Pascal included on the Free Pascal Wiki: "Occasionally, it has been claimed that Pascal was designed as a language for teaching. Although this is correct, its use in teaching was not the only goal. In fact, I do not believe in using tools and formalisms in teaching that are inadequate for any practical task.". | |
| Apr 25, 2019 at 7:31 | history | edited | Stephen Kitt | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 32 characters in body
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| Apr 25, 2019 at 7:26 | history | answered | Stephen Kitt | CC BY-SA 4.0 |