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From: "John Colagioia" <JColagioia@csi.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Re: what's wrong with some existing IF languages
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2002 09:04:26 -0400
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info@hoekstra-uitgeverij.nl (Richard Bos) wrote:
>"John Colagioia" <JColagioia@csi.com> wrote:
[...]
>> I mean, ignore the library, and ignore stupid changes
>> like function pointer syntax and prototypes.  What in
>> C has actually changed since the earliest days?
>Ignore the Norman invasions, and ignore the Great Vowel Shift. What in
>English has changed since Anglo-Saxon times?

Well, we've seen a love for Latin come and go; we've
had a particulate sublanguage (-oid, -ite, etc.) come,
go, and start to return; the subjunctive clause is
pretty much extinct; few readers would even recognize
an internal consonant...I could go on, but I sense
everyone's eyes glazing over...

>> Nothing, unless you use your C++ compiler to compile
>> C code, in which case you're in for a few annoying
>> surprises...
>Well, obviously. Using an Ada compiler to compile Pascal isn't going to
>endear you to it, either.

Right.  But that's where a lot of people point when
talking about changes to C, because it's 99.44%
compatible, or something...

>> >Many people think, and I agree with
>> >them, that C is a dead end in language development.
>> You might want to tell that to the C++, Java, and C#
>> people.  I wish *somebody* would...
>You might want to tell ISO, which has brought out a whole new C Standard
>in 1999.

Which is almost identical to the previous standard,
except it brings in a couple of items that nobody
really cares about except the occasional compiler-
writer.

I mean, a boolean type is nice, but I'll never get
to use it.  Why?  Well, I'm not going to abolish
the user-defined boolean throughout my code, since
that'll introduce more bugs than it'll fix, just
by virtue of the fact that I had to *touch* the
code to do it.

>Come to think of it, you might want to read that Standard, and
>the accompanying Rationale, before you try...

"Been there, done that," as the kids used to say.

>> >Hm. Programming in Prolog requires a different mindset and one that I never
>> >quite managed to master (nor did I have much incentive to, anyway). But it
>> >probably depends on the persons background.
>> Maybe.  I've been referred to by more than one person
>> over the years as "insane"...
>Well, I'm not sure mastering Prolog is more insane than mastering lambda
>calculus.

Which is something I play with, on occasion, too.

>Mastering Intercal, _that_ would be nuts <g>.

I've got some INTERCAL code floating around, but nothing
I'm extraordinarily proud of.  A lot of "pretending it's
C" with routines, and some trivial "native" coding, but,
alas, nothing bigger than that...

I *wanted* to, though...
