Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ames!pasteur!agate!labrea!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!lfcs!bct 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