Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!gatech!hao!husc6!necntc!ima!haddock!karl From: karl@haddock.ISC.COM (Karl Heuer) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: Mesa is a dreadful language? (look all are ALGOL based) Message-ID: <741@haddock.ISC.COM> Date: Wed, 15-Jul-87 16:24:36 EDT Article-I.D.: haddock.741 Posted: Wed Jul 15 16:24:36 1987 Date-Received: Fri, 17-Jul-87 07:35:21 EDT References: <764@unc.cs.unc.edu> <1120@killer.UUCP> <1064@ur-valhalla.UUCP> <2350@ames.arpa> <1063@theory.cs.cmu.edu> Reply-To: karl@haddock.ISC.COM (Karl Heuer) Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston Lines: 12 In article <1063@theory.cs.cmu.edu> dld@theory.cs.cmu.edu (David Detlefs) writes: >I would agree that C, Pascal, Mesa, the Algols, and the Modulas form a rough >equivalence class. I think there is a very important difference between >these and Fortran, however: Fortran does not have a pointer type. It's all a matter of degree. C has a powerful pointer type; Pascal has something they call a pointer but you can't use it to store the address of a variable; Fortran uses array indices. A "pointer" in Fortran is a pair where i is an integer and a is a (constant) array name. I'd put them all in the same equivalence class, along with Basic. Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl@haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint