great quote about the "C" language

[Neal Weidenhofer]

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>For everyday programming, the Lisp oblist is *all* reserved words -
>most Lisps have some very obscure function names;  mung those and you're
>without an interpreter.  In Franz, try the global var "base" - it's
>lots of fun!  BTW, I consider C library function names to be reserved
>words.  Perhaps they don't fit somebody's formal definition of "reserved
>word", but messin' with 'em is dangerous, and that's what counts.

	I've been concerned for some time now about where the "language"
leaves off and the "library" takes over.  Especially since Ada came on the
scene; in Ada (as I understand it), the programmer is encouraged to think
of not only public but private library routines as extensions to the 
language (at least in some sense--they're also very sensitive about any
"extensions" to Ada.)

	As a language developer, this strikes me as an extremely powerful
and useful paradigm but the formal descriptions haven't kept up.  I would
like to see what other ideas there might be out there about this.

			Regards,
				Neal Weidenhofer
				Denelcor, Inc.
				<hao|csu-cs|brl-bmd>!denelcor!neal