Re: The HLL Temptations

Betov wrote:
"Alex McDonald" <alex_mcd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> écrivait news:1119443969.370999.18450@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:


Did you _ analyse_ the reasons of your opinion? I mean,
what facts, in your experience, do show the HLLs as
winners? What relationship between these facts and the
Language.

[The _Language_. Not the Developement environnement] 

Well, let's take a simple case of writing a report from a flat file.
For that, I'd use one of the languages that makes the task trivial;
Perl, or RPG. For functional programming; Lisp. For goal based rule
matching, say in an expert system; Prolog. The latter I would _never_
contemplate doing in assembler; there aren't enough lifetimes.


So, you will learn one Language for each problem.

Yes! As a carpenter, do you use your chisel as a screwdriver? "French for poetry, German for precision, Italian for romance." You're not a monoglot.

OK, but, if you had an Assembler doing all of these,
either through "Side-Tools", or by any Code reuse
Method, what difference would it make? One: You
would not have to learn all of these dedicated
Languages, but, at most, a small Script Language,
and/or how to use a click&Go "Wizard".

Nonsense. You, Betov, can't do what Prolog does in assembler. I defy you to write a pattern matcher. Half an hour with a Prolog or Perl manual, you'll be doing both. Perhaps clumsily at first, but that's better than waiting for you to write it in assembler.


Taking your last example, this is not on the fault
of Assembly Language if nobody ever wrote the Asm
version of the mechanisms, and not on the fault of
Asm, if the guy(s) who wrote "Prolog" did it as a
full HLL instead of doing it as an Assembly-Assembler
implementation.

Please, you're making me laugh. Do you have a clue what a goal based rule system is even about, or how the data is specified, or the query language you'd need to make it work? The rule specification and query language wouldn't look like assembler, that's for sure.


The only possible conclusion is that the job is not
done. And the reason for that is well known: Money.

Tosh on stilts. The reason is well known; no-one is stupid enough to start with assembler.

Also, the natural base of Programming is Assembly. So,
Assembly being there before the HLL, the job of proving
anything should be on the HLL side.


The natural base of programming is language. Programming algorithms are
defined in anything but assembler; pseudo code mainly, and most of it
based on Algol type language constructs. Then they're translated to
assembler, or whatever, but no-one defines programming problems and
solutions in assembler; that limits the solution to a single
architecture.



I do not feel concerned, in any way, by this way of
thinking the Programmation, and this does not make
any sense to me. All i know is that i cannot know
what a program will look like, before it would be
finished, or almost finished.

You'd be fun on a project to deliver an application to perform against a specification! Perhaps we need a new term for this unstructured activity; mystic programming?



Off topic windbagging snipped.



The first assembler was AutoCoder in around 1952; prior to that, much
programming was on patch panels or hand cranked code. Fortran followed
in 1954 -- a two year gap. Here's a brief Fortran history, the first
really successful HLL;
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/languages/fortran/ch1-1.html; you'll find
there why they bothered. Programs in *hours*, not *weeks*. And on
machines so small, the average mobile phone would put them in the
shade.



This Page is just a list of no base assertions.

Were is an example of any Application that would
have taken *hours* instead of *weeks*? Were is
the Assembly version? Where is the HLL version?
What Assembler? What programmers qualifications?
How many experiments? How many programmers?

OK, you win. Unqualified (although I've no doubt that *something* drove them to write Fortran). I'll see if I can find a better reference.

===snipped



You're thinking Intel desktops.


_YES_, of course, i "think x86", and do not fell concerned
in anyway by what else around. I feel concerned with what
people use for Programming.

! People use eveything but assembler for programming. Where have you been for the last 50 years?

Not by the language some
industrial used to write the program in my washing machine.
Who cares?

There are more mobile phones running Java out in the real world than there are PCs. Mobile phone users care.


Also, i do not feel concerned in any way, by the "Professional
are". "Professional" means "making money". Not making a good
work, the good way. (They also answer: "Who cares?" :))


Did you buy or steal your operating system of choice? It's not Linux, a decision I find strange given your attitude to money.

--
Regards
Alex McDonald
.

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