federico@actisb.UUCP (Federico Heinz) (06/07/89)
kloppen@gmdzi.UUCP (Jelske Kloppenburg) writes: >And I am waiting for apologies from Martin Neitzel. Er... excuse me for getting in your way, but aren't you getting carried away? This has been just an exchange of opinions, and a pretty technical one at that. All arguments I've seen exposed (and I inspected all of them pretty thoroughly, since I was the one who asked) were pretty well thought out. Why make a personal question out of it? You both presented your interpretations of the matter, and the message that cleared the question was one describing the current ETH implementation, not How It Should Be Done, since Wirth doesn't seem to know that himself (and I don't think that's a blame). Don't get angry for nothing, both your and Martin's contributions were insightfull and illuminating, and are a good example of fuzziness in the Modula-2 definition (which I hadn't noticed until now). And talking definition: there is something I've been wondering some time now, and I don't know whether it's been answered here before. Wirth doesn't include any facilities to initialize structures at compile-time, neither in Pascal nor in Modula (don't know about Oberon). Not only that, there aren't any structured constants in either language. I'm planning to program yet another uucp packet-driver protocol for the ATARI ST in this summer holidays, and I selected C as the language of choice exactly because it offers this capability (which is vital to my approach to communication protocols). I'd rather program it in Modula, but I can't think of a way of doing it without an endless string of initialazation assignments, which consumes time (not that important, it's done only once per run) and memory space (IMPORTANT). Most of the data could be read from a file, but I also need initialized PROCEDURE variables in the structure, and you can't file those out. Does anybody out there know WHY there aren't any structured constants in Wirth's languages? Is there any academic background to this limitation, is it just to keep the compiler simple, or is it to keep the language compatible with some (weird) machines that don't support an initialized data space? An inquiring mind (if you can call mine that) wants to know... -- Federico Heinz "I can resist anything but temptation" -- Oscar Wilde From Europe: ...!mcvax!unido!tub!actisb!federico From elsewhere: ...!uunet!pyramid!/
neitzel@infbs.UUCP (Martin Neitzel) (06/09/89)
kloppen@gmdzi.UUCP (Jelske Kloppenburg) writes: JK> JK> And I am waiting for apologies from Martin Neitzel. In article <346@actisb.UUCP> federico@actisb.UUCP (Federico Heinz) writes: FH> FH> Er... excuse me for getting in your way, but aren't you getting FH> carried away? This has been just an exchange of opinions, and a pretty FH> technical one at that. Note quite, I really did attack him in an unfair way. In the summary line in the reply to his description of VAL() in the TUM-compiler, I accused him incorrectly world wide for posting "misinformation". In addition, the first sentence of this reply was written in a rude tone. All this was unjustified. I reviewed all concerned articles yesterday and have learned that I most probably misinterpreted Jeske Kloppenburg and that he probably very well _can_ disseminate the Mod2 definition from its implementations. His summary lines from both his articles mark them explicitly as implementation specific. This alone invalids my insult because of misinformation. A public apology from my side *is* appropriate: Es tut mir wirklich leid. It has become a popular custom in the country both Jelske and I live in to explain unfortunate, foolish, or plain wrong statements with the word "blackout". :-) Such one must have hit me, too. :-( I promise to behave cooler next time. [The basic reason for the blackout was that I personally can't stand it when someone argues about matters of a programming language with the behaviour of his compiler as reference for "correctness". This is one of the reasons for the poor s/n ratio in comp.lang.c and I don't want to see c.l.m2 following it. I didn't see Jelskes summary lines in his postings at that time, misunderstood his contribution as an explanation of the "official" term "type transfer", and ...uh... forgot myself...] Martin