Re: Procedure types and An extended discussion of extensibility

From: [at]} <Rex>
Date: Mon, 06 Dec 2004 16:33:48 -0600

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Fyodor Tkachov wrote:
>Robert, please, by all means, do take care of the fortran programmers. :-)
In the meantime, I am reading a one-semester course (16x2-hr lectures) to 1=
st year physics students after which they are fully comfortable with the ba=
sic structure of BlackBox....


        Sorry, Fyodor, this note is not aimed specifically at you, but I am using your message as a starting point.

        Careful. FORTRAN probably deserves a little more respect, and it offers lessons for the Oberon community. The bad news is that FORTRAN programmers outnumber you. Not only that, but much of the most ancient, crufty FORTRAN code is still reuseable, in spite of its Stone-Age foundation. As bad as FORTRAN is in some respects, there is probably more reuseable code in FORTRAN than in all the Oberon dialects combined. Even worse, you can do calculations with FORTRAN that you may never be able to do with Oberon, CP, or any C derivative.

        Why? Because with rare exceptions, the standards do not break code. Once it's written, it stays written, as long as it does not make use of language extensions. Basically, people could write in FORTRAN, with confidence that the code would still compile years in the future. Furthermore, I can't begin to tell you how many scientists I know who cling to it because (1) they have invested years writing their code, and (2) they can actually read code written in FORTRAN.

        The more code that is written, the worse it is to change it. With the Oberon languages we have a yo-yo effect, where certain features are in and then out, then in again. Do I need to enumerate? Now we are actually talking about discarding procedural parameters, and with it, Campbell's libraries. Folks, even talking about discarding features is the quickest way I know to kill a language. Don't even think of it. And anyone who implements a language had better implement the whole language or none of it.

        It's fine to go on endlessly debating the perfect, minimal mixture of orthogonal features, but it's not fine to penalize people who just want to go about their business writing standards-compliant code. Add features if you want, but don't discard them. You've got this great language. Don't ruin it by trying to make it perfect. I hope I'm misunderstanding.

Sincerely,
Rex Couture, Ph. D.
Dept. of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Campus Box 1169
Washington University in St. Louis
1 Brookings Dr.
St. Louis MO 63130

Voice: (314) 935-4194
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Received on Mon Dec 06 2004 - 23:33:48 UTC