Re: Head scratching in language X superior to language Y

On 28 Feb., 10:50, "Stuart" <stu...@xxx> wrote:
<thomas.mer...@xxxxxx> wrote in message

news:cae970f1-1f2f-457b-b8fa-666a1f3b7bab@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

On,
On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 07:01:06 -0600, thomas.mer...@xxxxxx wrote
Programming languages designed by a committee usually
have a bad reputation.

<comment by Randy Howard <randyhow...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 27 Feb., 14:59:

Can you name a language that was designed by a committee? Ada maybe,
I'm not sure about its ancestry. Others? There aren't very many I
suspect. There are a lot of languages that started out non-standard,
but became maintained and/or extended by standard bodies later due to
popularity or a perceived need for standardization for portability
reasons.
I was referring to situation where a standard exists and it takes
many years until an implementation shows up. Ada and C99 are
such cases.

For Ada, are you referring to the core language or the special
needs annexes (which the standard identifies as optional)?
No. I was referring to my own experience:
In 1980 or 1981 (at the beginning of my studies) I attend a lecture
at the technical university of vienne where Ada was intruduced.
In 1984 a fellow student finished his study of computer science
(together with me). His diploma thesis was about writing an Ada
compiler. He did not finish code generation but the other parts
where there. From this fellow student I have the information that
his compiler would have been one of the first Ada compilers.
Years later I still heard stories about: Ada not available at this
and that machine.

I do not want to blame Ada. I just think that a specefication has a
better quality and is easier to implement when some prototype
implementation exists and has a feedback to the specification.

The fellow student who did the Ada compiler told me about problems
in parsing an Ada program. He told me that he needed an extra
function to determine what meaning a parenthesis has. When you
compare this to Pascal which can be parsed with LL(1) such
complexity can be seen as unneccessary. A prototype implementation
would have shown such hard to parse parts and the specification
could have been changed before releasing it.

I know what I am talking about: Seed7 (under its former name MASTER)
did exist on paper for a long time. The attempts to implement it
directly from the paper specification failed. It turned out to be
better when a prototype implementation helps to change some
hard-to-implement features in the specification. Using the feedback
from an implementation helped to succeed finally in the
implementation of Seed7. This incremental process leads IMHO to
better results (for big and complex problems).

Greetings Thomas Mertes

Seed7 Homepage: http://seed7.sourceforge.net
Seed7 - The extensible programming language: User defined statements
and operators, abstract data types, templates without special
syntax, OO with interfaces and multiple dispatch, statically typed,
interpreted or compiled, portable, runs under linux/unix/windows.
.

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