gudeman@arizona.edu (David Gudeman) (01/09/89)
In article <5795@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> rjh@cs.purdue.EDU (Bob Hathaway) writes: >Lets please stop using the term B&D languages, this is a bad >analogy and a heavily biased opinion. Maybe I can't adequately >express classes or model abstractions in expression-based >language X and feel similarly constrained. This shows the >term 'B&D' can be applied from almost any paradigm or style >of programming to any other and is semantically worthless. >Lets be more precise and use unambiguous terms such as >strongly, weakly, or dynamically typed languages so we don't have >to type 'k' so often. It's not an analogy, it's a pun. And it refers to the philosophy of language design in which the language designers feel it is their responsibility to constrain (hence ``Bondage'') the programmer to adhere to certain Disciplines in programming. Now, ``Police state language'' is an analogy. And it doesn't refer to a paradigm (a way in which a given languages encourages the programmer to view computation) since there can be functional and logical B&D languages as well as imperative ones. You don't lable a language ``B&D'' just because you can't do something in that language, you call it that because (1) there is something you can't do, (2) the designers of the language predicted people would want to do it, and (3) the designers deliberately made it impossible because they thought it was a bad thing to do. I don't suppose there is much point in arguing language design philosophy, since different languages are designed with different goals and priorities.