Re: TeX and Pascal [was Re: The joy of FORTRAN]

On 29/09/2024 06:44, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
The only ones I came to HATE

   were LISP/PROLOG and ADA - the latter being SO fascist
   that, well, no WONDER govt projects take 20 years ....

Well yes, that what happens when you let computer scientists take over.
I knew someone who ran a small company doing low level programming fir their custome hardware.
One day one of the coders said 'lets do the next one in C++'
So they did, and a year later realised that before you wrote C++ you have to sit down and write some or of spec to show what objects you are going to need to create etc etc.
In the same way I always write down a crude 'data dictionary' whenever I am implementing any sort of file based data system. And especially an SQL based one
But they didn't. They tried to hack it and it was a disaster.
I hate OO.
It is a compsci invention that doesn't map well onto an actually CPU which is a procedural beast.
Most of its vaunted advantages can be attained by writing C in a structured way and others like operator overloading are just damned confusing.
I don't WANT to use the same syntax to add two strings together as to add two numbers.
I found that out in JavaScript where a comparison between a string  "1" and a number 1 failed on IE but worked on Firefox.
I had found an 'undefined' gap in the language.
In C you are absolutely aware at all times what type of object you are dealing with and if you move to another one it's via an explicit cast. Or if implicit, you normally get a compiler warning.
In C if you want to deallocate RAM you say so. It doesn't silently collect garbage under your feet and take a millisecond to do it
Javascript silently just does what it *thinks* you meant. And gets it wrong.
In short there is a layer of uncertainty built into modern languages that attempt to map abstract compsci concepts into actual procedural code.
Which is why C is probably still the most popular  language.
--
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
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