rf@wu1.UUCP (01/08/85)
The term "high-level" used to imply a hierarchy in which the first level was
numeric machine code, the second level was assembler code, the third level
was procedural languages like FORTRAN and COBOL, and the forth was problem-
oriented "languages" like MACSYMA or VisiCalc. By this definition it is
clear that Ada, Algol, Basic, C, COBOL, FORTRAN, Modula-2, Pascal, and PL/I
are all at the same level.
Regrettably, sales hype has given the term "high-level" the meaning "good".
Thus the discussion of language level in net.lang is becoming a discussion
of the quality of languages -- an interesting topic, but not one subject to
quantification or resolution.
Randolph Fritz
UUCPnet: {ihnp4,decvax}!philabs!wu1!rf
"We can only truly see, even the best of us, even the greatest,
what we love." -- Archibald MacLeishjc@mit-athena.ARPA (John Chambers) (01/09/85)
sing the term, and their motive is clear: they want to sound "technical". Physicists are quite justified in using the term with its correct technical meaning, and disregarding the public's misuse of the term. Mathematicians as well as Computer Scientists have been annoyed by the public misuse of the term "parameter", which the media, bureaucrats, and so on are saying when they mean "limit". We aren't forced to adopt the public's misuse; we are quite justified in continuing to use "parameter" with its standard technical meaning. For some years, the public has been misusing the term "doctor" to mean only medical doctors. This doesn't mean a person with a Ph.D. in Chemistry or Paleontology or Basket Weaving is forbidden the use of the term. It just means that the general public is using a precise academic title incorrectly. Similarly, I think that the term "high-level", misused though it may be by admen and journalists, does nonetheless refer to a useful concept, and one for which there doesn't at the moment seem to be a better term. Calling one language "high-level" and another "low-level" is not praising either, nor is it an insult. C is called a "low-level high-level language" by its original developers, and we know what they meant by that. It is a good description, and I think it is a useful one. It says that C was designed to deal more directly with hardware issues than other languages that are superficially similar; it was not designed to deal well with abstract data independent of its representation. This is good in some applications (like writing a device driver), bad in others (like writing a portable symbolic math package). So C is well-designed for some tasks, and poorly designed for others. This is useful information to those who need to make decisions about how to implement things. Please don't try to take this away from us! I wish we could find a way to stop (or at least seriously impede) the misuse of technical terms by people who are just trying to sound impressive. But I suspect that this is impossible as long as science and technology have such high regard among the general the population. We just have to learn to live with the fact that many technical terms also have a "media" meaning that is often a garbled or distorted parody of the "real" meaning. It's part of the price we pay for our success. John Chambers
nather@utastro.UUCP (Ed Nather) (01/13/85)
[] >I wish we could find a way to stop (or at least seriously impede) the misuse >of technical terms by people who are just trying to sound impressive. But I >suspect that this is impossible as long as science and technology have such >high regard among the general the population. We just have to learn to live >with the fact that many technical terms also have a "media" meaning that is >often a garbled or distorted parody of the "real" meaning. It's part of the >price we pay for our success. > > John Chambers There is hope: a `technical' term ported to common use only sounds impressive for a short time -- it is either widely adopted, and therefore rendered quite unimpressive, or it is *not* adopted because it is inappropriate, and is thus rendered unimpressive. All we have to do is hang in there. Ed Nather {allegra,ihnp4}!{noao,ut-sally}!utastro!nather