Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site mit-athena.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!zehntel!hplabs!hpda!fortune!amdcad!decwrl!decvax!mit-athena!jc From: jc@mit-athena.ARPA (John Chambers) Newsgroups: net.lang Subject: Re: "high-level" (some thoughts) Message-ID: <17@mit-athena.ARPA> Date: Wed, 9-Jan-85 13:30:55 EST Article-I.D.: mit-athe.17 Posted: Wed Jan 9 13:30:55 1985 Date-Received: Mon, 14-Jan-85 04:07:41 EST References: <331@wu1.UUCP> Lines: 41 sing the term, and their motive is clear: they want to sound "technical". Physicists are quite justified in using the term with its correct technical meaning, and disregarding the public's misuse of the term. Mathematicians as well as Computer Scientists have been annoyed by the public misuse of the term "parameter", which the media, bureaucrats, and so on are saying when they mean "limit". We aren't forced to adopt the public's misuse; we are quite justified in continuing to use "parameter" with its standard technical meaning. For some years, the public has been misusing the term "doctor" to mean only medical doctors. This doesn't mean a person with a Ph.D. in Chemistry or Paleontology or Basket Weaving is forbidden the use of the term. It just means that the general public is using a precise academic title incorrectly. Similarly, I think that the term "high-level", misused though it may be by admen and journalists, does nonetheless refer to a useful concept, and one for which there doesn't at the moment seem to be a better term. Calling one language "high-level" and another "low-level" is not praising either, nor is it an insult. C is called a "low-level high-level language" by its original developers, and we know what they meant by that. It is a good description, and I think it is a useful one. It says that C was designed to deal more directly with hardware issues than other languages that are superficially similar; it was not designed to deal well with abstract data independent of its representation. This is good in some applications (like writing a device driver), bad in others (like writing a portable symbolic math package). So C is well-designed for some tasks, and poorly designed for others. This is useful information to those who need to make decisions about how to implement things. Please don't try to take this away from us! I wish we could find a way to stop (or at least seriously impede) the misuse of technical terms by people who are just trying to sound impressive. But I suspect that this is impossible as long as science and technology have such high regard among the general the population. We just have to learn to live with the fact that many technical terms also have a "media" meaning that is often a garbled or distorted parody of the "real" meaning. It's part of the price we pay for our success. John Chambers