hadeishi@husc7.HARVARD.EDU (Mitsuharu Hadeishi) (04/21/87)
Re: Acrimonious words on C vs. Modula-2 In the interests of reducing net-traffic I held a private email discussion with mmw about this language debate, and I think the main point of it all came down to this: There seem to be something like five generations of languages, and each should really be judged within it's class. First: assembler, second: Fortran, Basic, etc., (no data structures of any kind, except for kludging with arrays), third: C, Pascal, Modula-2, etc. (procedural languages that require a lot of programmer bookkeeping (especially in the realm of memory management), nice generalized data structures, but no data type extensibility or easy way to add new operators, however they make great high-level assemblers), fourth: Object LISP, C++, CLU, Flavors, Smalltalk, etc. (object-oriented languages which allow property inheritance, etc., quite easily and with a streamlined, consistent syntax), fifth: Prolog (logic programming). I, for one, think logic programming has certain disadvantages, not the least of which is the paradigm of problem solving which invovles assignment of discrete truth values and labels to objects, a method which I think will not lead to true AI. (I would personally favor a different fifth-generation language, perhaps the "cousin" of the logic-programming generation, which is heavily based on a massively-parallel description of problem solving involving pattern-recognition and generation of new abstract categories in a "fuzzy", "neural-net" kind of way, which has been shown to be quite successful in test cases, in particular, in coming up with new "concepts" and recognizing relationships that were not originally explicitly laid out, recognizing new, never-before-seen cases and so forth.) The upshot of this is that from a fourth-generation perspective, C is highly deficient, but this is natural, since it is a third-generation language. Mike had no problems with the idea that C is a very useful and elegant language for handling assembly-language type problems; in fact, he felt C was the best of that generation of language. It just isn't an AI language, which need to be fourth-generation or above. se ind