Xref: utzoo comp.lang.c:10736 comp.lang.misc:1666 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!necntc!ima!cfisun!lakart!dg From: dg@lakart.UUCP (David Goodenough) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: Should I convert to C? Message-ID: <158@lakart.UUCP> Date: 13 Jun 88 15:34:37 GMT References: <10800@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> Followup-To: comp.lang.misc Organization: Lake - The systems people Lines: 41 From article <10800@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>, by arnold2@violet.berkeley.edu (mchawi): > Summary: > C RULES (shortened) > PASCAL = BABY FOOD FORTH = HIEROGLYPHICS LISP = PERVERSION COBOL IS DEAD > FORTRAN = OBSOLETE PL/1 IS DEAD BASIC IS FOR STUPID PEOPLE I rarely flame, but this I think needs a flame. Let it be noted that EVERY language ever invented was designed to fulfill a need. Pascal was written to be a teaching aid - it shows the different relationships of scoping, has strict typing (something that is important to find out about :-) and many other advantages. Forth - this is a threaded interpretive language, or as I always conceive it, an incremental compiler. Forth programs ARE hard to read by C only people (myself included) but for real time control applications it blows C clean out of the water. Lisp, as the Acronym says is for "LISt Processing" - if you think lisp is a perversion you should try artificial intelligence in an imperative language (Lisp is demand driven - it only works something out when it has to) In particular it is possible to cause C to crash or infinitely recurse by doing things that are trivial in LISP. COBOL may be dead, but at the last count about 60-70% of code written in the U.S. was written in "COmmon Business Oriented Language" COBOL allows a good programming team to run off a GL package in less than no time flat because it provides all the tools (Where in the C library is the subroutine that does a polyphase merge sort on a database file). Fortran is not obsolete, it was designed for "FORmula TRANslation", i.e. for numerical analysis it is superior to C in many respects: Complex is an implicit data type to name just one. PL/1 I will not comment on as I know nothing about it. And BASIC. "Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code". As it says, it is for beginners. I would submit that there was a time when BASIC would have been suitable for the original poster (or for me for that matter) because we were all beginners at some time. How many C novices do you know can be writing meaningful programs 1/2 an hour after turning on the computer. Some people I know couldn't even get the compiler to work, let alone run the program. Just because a language is not suitable for the application you have in mind DOES NOT MEAN THAT there is anything wrong with it. -- dg@lakart.UUCP - David Goodenough +---+ | +-+-+ ....... !harvard!cca!lakart!dg +-+-+ | +---+