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