Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!mupsy!mucs!r1!chl
From: chl@r1.uucp (Charles Lindsey)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Algol-68 down for the count (was: Why have FORTRAN 8x at all?)
Message-ID: <5184@ux.cs.man.ac.uk>
Date: 30 Nov 88 11:02:37 GMT
References: <388@ubbpc.UUCP> <16187@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <599@quintus.UUCP> <7724@boring.cwi.nl> <406@ubbpc.UUCP>
Sender: news@ux.cs.man.ac.uk
Reply-To: chl@r1.UUCP (Charles Lindsey)
Organization: University of Manchester, UK
Lines: 27

In article <406@ubbpc.UUCP> wgh@ubbpc.UUCP (William G. Hutchison) writes:
>  success-1: having lots of neat design ideas, and
>  success-2: being widely adopted.
>
> Here are some more opinions:
> ...
>Modula2 success-1	success-2	small group
>Pascal	 success-1	success-2	small group

No. Bill Hutchison still does not understand. He now categorises ALGOL 68
correctly, but for the Wirth offerings he should have written

Pascal	failure-1	success-2	one man
Modula2	disaster-1	success-2	one man

In both of these cases the problem was that the one man did not have the
slightest idea how to write a consistent and leak-proof Language Defining
Document. As a result, both langauges leak (the second one more so). It took
years of effort by an ISO committee to patch up the PASCAL mess (and the
result is indeed a camel, but that is not the committee's fault). Another
committee is currently trying to do the same for Modula-2.

BTW, I see that DEC have now produced a Modula-3 (Luca Cardelli et al, Digital
Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, August 1988), but I have not had time to
read it yet.

Charles Lindsey	chl@ux.cs.man.ac.uk