Re: The Fundamental Confusion of Xah

On Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:35:01 +0100, Jon Harrop <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Vend wrote:
On 18 Lug, 22:34, Jon Harrop <j...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The difference is productivity. Modern software obviously benefits
enormously from the use of recently adopted technologies like garbage
collection and closures.

Recently adopted?

I was referring to the mainstream. Garbage collection and closures have long
since been available in esoteric languages like Lisp, as you say, but they
were not widely adopted until relatively recently (very recently for
closures).

IMO, the term "mainstream" also includes the Pascal family. Modern
derivatives of Pascal - Ada, Modula2+, Modula 3, Oberon, etc. - have
had GC since the 1980's. Ada and Oberon have language supported
threads and Ada has co-routines so effectively it has continuations.
None of these languages are "esoteric" - they require only minor
adjustments from C/C++ programmers.

Ada has quite a large following in the U.S., Europe and Japan where it
is used for a lot of safety critical industrial applications and for
embedded programming, and it is still the preferred language for all
U.S. Pentagon contracts (although it is not required). Ada is
required for most aerospace applications in the U.S. and Europe.

Oberon is still taught in some European schools and has a fair sized
user community there and in the Middle East. Modula 3 is largely
academic now, but it was originally developed for industrial use and
still sports a small number of commercial developers. Both Modula 3
and Oberon have large research communities.

George
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