ambiguous ?

[Henry Spencer]

In article <14098 at lanl.gov> jlg at lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
>...  such experiments were done of languages
>as different as APL and TOPPS.  Productivity always was _better_
>for variants of the language with expression side-effects removed.

I'm not familiar with the APL experiments... but as far as TOPPS, one
should bear in mind that TOPPS1 was an awful language (I speak as
someone who programmed in it) and TOPPS2 made a whole bunch of, on
the whole, badly needed changes.  Concluding that TOPPS2 was superior
to TOPPS1 because of the side-effect issue alone is laughable.
-- 
A bit of tolerance is worth a  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
megabyte of flaming.           | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu