throopw@sheol.UUCP (Wayne Throop) (04/02/91)
- gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
-- throopw@sheol.UUCP (Wayne Throop)
-- It seems clear that [...] the phrase "can, in
-- principle, be compiled" means exactly what David means by "can be
-- implemented" in this context.
- It will take a great deal of evidence to convince me that the Algol
- committee members were so ignorant that they actually argued over the
- implementability of anything in Algol 60.
Well, I was under the impression that the phrase refered to Algol 68,
and not Algol 60. This impression of mine is primarily based on the
sentence in which the phrase in question occured, which was:
] As late as Algol 68, the arguments are mostly about whether
] things can, *in principle*, be compiled;
Now, as others have pointed out (I'm mainly thinking of
anw@maths.nott.ac.uk (Andy Walker)), the Algol folks at that time were
concerned about (if I may oversimplify) issues of syntactic ambiguity
and the like, which makes my "means exactly" at best misleading. (Yes
Virginia, this is a face-saving ploy intended to avoid saying "I was
wrong when I said `means exactly'".)
But nevertheless, I think it is still pretty clear that these folks
didn't have a "psychotic fixation on efficiency". No way, no how.
--
Wayne Throop ...!mcnc!dg-rtp!sheol!throopw