Re: "The Best Programming Language for the End of the World"

Hans Bezemer <the.beez.speaks@gmail.com> writes:

You can tune the behavior of most C compilers as well - comply to a
certain standard. Don't tell me you can't do that with Forth (because
you can).

C standards avoid incompatible changes as good as they can.  However,
because C is a keyword-based language and redefining existing names
produces an error in C, even adding a single keyword or a single name
can break compatibility with an existing program, and the compilers
allow you to dial the specific standard in order to deal with that.

Forth is better suited to deal with such changes, but then some people
come along and use the misfeatures of C as encouragement for their
desire to break existing programs.

OTOH, Forth is worse suited to deal with dial-your-language-version
options: C uses separate compilation, so if the main program uses some
version of the standard, and a library uses a different version,
that's typically no problem, because they are both compiled with
different compiler calls (which may have different options).

Forth, OTOH, compiles all the sources in one compilation run, and any
choices you dial at one point tend to affect all the rest of the
compilation, even if it compiles some independently developed library.
One could dream up ways to deal with that problem, but given past
experience, I doubt such ideas would find enough support; some would
call that "WIBNI"s, while others would point out that Chuck Moore did
not bring these ideas down from the mountain.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl  http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
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