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From: bct@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Brian Tompsett)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: What makes a language successful? (Was: Algol-68 down for the count)
Message-ID: <1126@etive.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 4 Dec 88 16:10:51 GMT
References: <388@ubbpc.UUCP> <16187@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <599@quintus.UUCP> <1064@raspail.UUCP> <413@ubbpc.UUCP>
Sender: news@etive.ed.ac.uk
Reply-To: bct@ecsvax.ed.ac.uk (Brian Tompsett)
Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, Edinburgh University, U.K.
Lines: 32

In article <413@ubbpc.UUCP> wgh@ubbpc.UUCP (William G. Hutchison) writes:
>SUCCESS-C (having a devoted cult)
> APL, Algol-68, Icon, Modula-2, MUSL, occam, Ratfor (this is waning),
>Snobol, TRAC (?)
>
>FAILURE-D (baroque messes)
> Ada(?), MUSL, PL/I

  Dont be silly. The number of people who know what MUSL is can be counted on
the fingers of two hands. Manchester know about it, I know about it, one or
two at Unisys Blue Bell know about it and a few people in Bedford Massachusetts
know about it. If you start including every existing language right down to the
ones where the only user is the designer we will never end! [And more than that
it doesnt belong in either category. Most users hate it and it's too trivial to
be baroque]

 BTW. Algol 68 was my first language. I am grateful to my educators that it
was. It did help me to be a better programmer, a better computer scientist and
a better software engineer. It was sad when Algol 68 stopped being taught.

 Another sad point is that even died-in-the wool Algol 68 people like Charles
Lindsey have drifted into putting semi-colons before ENDs. I really hate that
part of Pascal: the fact that is picky where you put a semi colon in the
declaration part and not in the statement part. A bit inconsistent; and very
hard to explain to students. Now Algol 68 was nicely consistent here - and
knowledge of that helps me write better Pascal - or better anything else.

   Brian.
> Brian Tompsett. Department of Computer Science, University of Edinburgh,
> JCMB, The King's Buildings, Mayfield Road, EDINBURGH, EH9 3JZ, Scotland, U.K.
> Telephone:         +44 31 667 1081 x2711.
> JANET:  bct@uk.ac.ed.ecsvax  ARPA: bct%ed.ecsvax@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk