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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