Should I convert to C?

[David Goodenough]

>From article <10800 at agate.BERKELEY.EDU>, by arnold2 at violet.berkeley.edu (mchawi):
> Summary:
> C RULES (shortened)
> PASCAL = BABY FOOD   FORTH = HIEROGLYPHICS   LISP = PERVERSION   COBOL IS DEAD
> FORTRAN = OBSOLETE   PL/1 IS DEAD    BASIC IS FOR STUPID PEOPLE 

I rarely flame, but this I think needs a flame. Let it be noted that
EVERY language ever invented was designed to fulfill a need. Pascal was
written to be a teaching aid - it shows the different relationships of
scoping, has strict typing (something that is important to find out
about :-) and many other advantages. Forth - this is a threaded
interpretive language, or as I always conceive it, an incremental
compiler. Forth programs ARE hard to read by C only people (myself
included) but for real time control applications it blows C clean out
of the water. Lisp, as the Acronym says is for "LISt Processing" - if
you think lisp is a perversion you should try artificial intelligence
in an imperative language (Lisp is demand driven - it only works
something out when it has to) In particular it is possible to cause C
to crash or infinitely recurse by doing things that are trivial in
LISP. COBOL may be dead, but at the last count about 60-70% of code
written in the U.S. was written in "COmmon Business Oriented Language"
COBOL allows a good programming team to run off a GL package in less
than no time flat because it provides all the tools (Where in the C
library is the subroutine that does a polyphase merge sort on a
database file). Fortran is not obsolete, it was designed for "FORmula
TRANslation", i.e. for numerical analysis it is superior to C in many
respects: Complex is an implicit data type to name just one. PL/1 I
will not comment on as I know nothing about it. And BASIC. "Beginners
All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code". As it says, it is for
beginners. I would submit that there was a time when BASIC would have
been suitable for the original poster (or for me for that matter)
because we were all beginners at some time. How many C novices do you
know can be writing meaningful programs 1/2 an hour after turning on
the computer. Some people I know couldn't even get the compiler to
work, let alone run the program. Just because a language is not
suitable for the application you have in mind DOES NOT MEAN THAT there
is anything wrong with it.
-- 
	dg at lakart.UUCP - David Goodenough		+---+
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