On Thursday 08 November 2007 07:52, Barker, Sean (UK) wrote:
> This mail is publicly posted to a distribution list as part of a
> process of public discussion, any automatically generated statements
> to the contrary non-withstanding. It is the opinion of the author,
> and does not represent an official company view. (01)
What is all this?? (02)
> Sean Barker
> Bristol, UK (03)
> > -----Original Message-----
> > On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
> > Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Please thread the discussion
>
> ...
>
> > Following is the original justification for this proposed law:
> >
> >
> > http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/email-archives/srkb.messages/24.html
>
> extract from above:
>
> "3. DARPA developed Ada as the standard for systems programming.
>
> Result: C (a language that violated nearly every one of the
> design goals for Ada) became the standard for system programming."
>
> My impression was that Ada was Pascal++, but that C was really
> FORTRAN 75 (i.e. Fortran NOT updated by a committee, cf "A camel is a
> horse designed by a committee"). The jaundiced view is that C took
> off because it allowed you to program without thinking, and to get
> round the constraints which good practice imposes. (04)
There is virtually nothing in common between FORTRAN and C. As to
your "jaundiced view," little could be further from the truth. C is a
challenging language to program in owing to its very low-level
formalisms, its deliberate refusal to abstract away many of the
characteristics of the hardware targeted by its code generator and its
silent acceptance of many programs that are non-portable and / or
flatly incorrect. (05)
The "jaundiced" characterization of C is that it's a portable assembly
language. (06)
> ... (07)
Randall Schulz (08)
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