hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) (03/23/91)
In article <1991Mar22.205451.4339@linus.mitre.org>, john@mingus.mitre.org (John D. Burger) writes: > mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald) writes: > Real Programmers (TM) are not masochists and seldom are Real Typists > (TM) and simply HATE to type for the most common construct in any > program the loathsome, redundant, hard to type, piece of shit: > := > Gee, you'd realy hate Common Lisp: > (SETF X 4) > instead of > x=4; > or even > x:=4; The answer is yes! What I have about assembler language is having to use some obfuscated notation which someone who does not care one bit about how many obstacles are put in the way of my entering programs has designed. The answer is to have macro translators which can take what the user wants to write, highly overloaded, using types, etc., and translate them. These are necessarily quite complicated, but they do exist partially. Consider the complexity which a Fortran compiler undergoes on seeing x**y. The types of x and y, and even special values, affect the translation into machine primitives. This is an essential part of languages/compilers, and is pretty much independent of the other parts. -- Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399 Phone: (317)494-6054 hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet) {purdue,pur-ee}!l.cc!hrubin(UUCP)