Re: one-liner for characater replacement

On May 29, 4:32 pm, "James Giles" <jamesgi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
FX wrote:
Excel's superb graphics package

That's when I realised it had to be a joke ;-)  Frankly, there's a
lot to be said about Excel (which I don't use much, but my wife uses
it as her Swiss army knife for numerical tasks), but "superb
graphics" is surely not one of them. Have you ever used other
graphing tools and compared the output?

In any case, he still hasn't made any connections between what
he thinks the target user community is and what he thinks the
languae design should be.  

I interpret this as "the design of a product need not consider what
its users want to do with it".

Such a statement can only be made by someone who has never been in the
profit-making world.

I'll wait for the ongoing tragedy of Fortran to unfold some more
before reiterating my futile indignation over the destruction of
something that has been a central part of my computing career pretty
much all my adult life.

It seems to me that a poorly considered
feature is just a bad whether you write and maintain large codes
in a corporate setting or if you write (and throw away) short
codes in a garage.


http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.12160&changeNav=9834

Ron Bell described use of Fortran at the Atomic Weapons Establishment.
Fortran 90 had been enthusiastically adopted there and was much prized
for its performance. Comparable US sites had moved to C and C++
because they were the languages with which new recruits were familiar;
this was regarded at AWE as a retrograde step.

end quote.

Evidence like the above will eventually force the remaining
Fortranners with their head buried in concrete to take notice of the
world around them.

Fortran is dying not because of the presence or absence of this or
that feature - sometime in the early 1970s-late 1980s timeframe it
stopped being a grown up language. A grown up language in my
definition is one which has new young users taking it up naturally,
one that is considered sufficiently reliable to have millions or
billions of dollars of revenue depend on programs written in it, one
which allows vendors and clients enter into legal contracts with
Service Level Agreements for the performance of programs written in
it , one that has a large users' forum with people exchanging their
latest and greatest code snippets and I am sure I can add other
criteria with a little more thought.

It almost seems like bad manners on Fortran's part to be still alive
in the eyes of mainstream computing. This cannot be remedied in any
way.

The sooner we all agree that it is detined to be a niche language
intended to be used by amateurs and professsionals such as Physicists
who are not software professionals, the sooner we can come down to
earth and design a language only slightly larger than f77 that can
live on indefinitely to fulfill its natural purpose.

--
J. Giles

"I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software
design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously
no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated
that there are no obvious deficiencies."   --  C. A. R. Hoare

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Help from fellow Fortran Users
    ... > productivity experiments) language design principles, ... > designing the feature into the language. ... and he did not find Fortran to be superior. ... Pascal critics will enjoy Kernighan's essay "Why Pascal is Not My ...
    (comp.lang.fortran)
  • Re: Compiler Design
    ... is just plain bad design, not only from the viewpoint of compiler writers, ... The idea of a language is that it is easy for users to use. ... the then versions of FORTRAN and COBOl and Algol. ...
    (comp.lang.pl1)
  • Re: Is FORTRAN a dying language? (not a troll)
    ... Fortran was designed for numeric programming. ... C began life as a system programming language. ... People have tried to design do-all languages, which have had many interesting ... If the thing you want to do is mostly system programming, C is "better" than Fortran. ...
    (comp.lang.fortran)
  • Re: "built-in" File I/O
    ... good example of best language design. ... something like PL/I's DATA directed I/O without a ... The usual Fortran or PL/I I/O ...
    (comp.lang.pl1)
  • Re: R versus Fortran?
    ... I would never consider giving up Fortan and C/C++! ... Fortran and wanted to know the contrasting strengths of the two ... The graphics capability sounds really interesting. ... > language, with the convenience and slowness that implies. ...
    (sci.stat.math)