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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: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 18:38:44 -0400
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info@hoekstra-uitgeverij.nl (Richard Bos) wrote:
>"John Colagioia" <JColagioia@csi.com> wrote:
[...]
>> >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...
>No, we haven't, because all of those are the result of the events you
>were to ignore.

The Latinization (and subsequent, in-progress, de-
Latinization) of English has little to do with vowels, and
everything to do with scholars' changing opinion on the
suitability of English for sophisticated thought.  I point
you to "Language Myths," edited by Bauer and Trudgill, for
a better discussion of this than I could present,
particularly "Myth #16."

The sudden rise of particles is certainly not related to
the vowel shift, unless there was another shift in the
'20s that nobody bothered to tell me about.

The subjunctive clause?  Maybe, but doubtful, since it
doesn't sound awkward with modern vowels, which is
usually why such changes occur.

The disappearance of the internal/external consonant
distinction, though, I'll grant you.  I didn't quite
think that one through.

>In any case, this misses the point, which is that it's all very well to
>say "ignore major parts of a language; what's left isn't worth much",
>but that isn't a very strong argument. The library and prototypes _are_
>part of C; ignoring them is not going to tell you much about the
>language.

What I'm saying is that C is more than a language,
and, therefore, things that are part of the C
standard are not necessarily part of the C language,
regardless of what ISO calls it.

[...]
>> >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,
>It is about twice the size. In what way is this "almost identical"?

It changes few things that make any difference to the
programmer; those things that it does introduce are
either highly ignorable, because they don't mix with
"traditional" code, or not really useful for any but
a small handful of applications, where they likely
introduce more runtime overhead than they're worth.

Heh...Oh, and it convinced you that the word "language"
meant something else, but that's hardly a change to C,
right...?

>> except it brings in a couple of items that nobody
>> really cares about except the occasional compiler-
>> writer.
>There is restrict. There is type generic maths. There is complex maths.
>There is control over the floating point environment.

Of these, which affect actual, existing programs?

Let's even assume we're writing a brand-new program.
Which of these are we going to use more than once, if
we're not in an engineering firm?

>They added
>standard width types, and long long.

More variations on "int" (which just about every
compiler did a long time ago, anyway).

>They added flexible array members.

Slow, and not as useful or usable as it sounds.

>We now officially have snprintf()

Library.

>and inline.

See 'int,' above.  Additionally, it changes nothing
about the way a program is written; it just tries to
raise an optimization up to the language level.  I
consider that a no-no, too, incidentally.

>I could go on, but if you
>_have_ got the C99 Standard, you can look up the list yourself.

Of the changes which I remember, the arrays and complex
math seem to be the only ones that might actually change
code.  And, they seem rare enough cases (in C) that it
wasn't worth adding them.

If you chose C over PERL, you don't want variable-length
arrays, because they're slow.

>> >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.
>Then I cannot fathom why you would call the two Standards "almost
>identical".

Conceptually, from the perspective of a programmer.  If
I were a compiler-writer, I *might* have a different
opinion, but that's hardly a judgement I can make...
unless someone would like to hire me to do so, of
course...

[...]
