mo@prisma.UUCP (Mike O'Dell) (09/08/88)
One reader took great umbrage at my somewhat whimsical description of Postscript as "being worse than most assemblers." As a language, I consider Postscript to be a real landmark in the semantic domain. It is a language for imaging. Syntactically, I find it problematic at least. This particular reader claims to have no problem with the language; I applaud him and his compatriots. Personally, I would rather like to see the power expressed in a syntax I already understand, like infix. Call me a crusty ol' curmudgeon. So, don't get me wrong: I LIKE Postscript and what it does. How it looks on the page and how long it takes me to figure out what is going on (probably because I don't have time to work at it for long periods of time) ain't my favorite thing. -Mike
rehmi@dot.unipress.COM (Rehmi Post) (09/14/88)
>From: rutgers!uunet.uu.net!prisma!mo (Mike O'Dell) >>(2) NeWS suffers from needing two programming languages, one worse than >> most assemblers. This could change soon, however. >One reader took great umbrage at my somewhat whimsical description >of Postscript as "being worse than most assemblers." ... Oh! I thought you were referring to C -- I couldn't have agreed more. Was it Dick Gabriel who mentioned that C had set software engineering in the US back by almost a decade? Now that you mention it, PostScript is a neat little object-oriented assembly language. Granted, the confusion between errors and stop/stopped and exit/loop could stand smoothing out, but where else (besides lisp) is it so easy to build new control constructs? In a slightly more serious vein, does anyone know of efforts underway to develop a generalized PostScript engine in silicon? Or is everyone concentrating on making either YARISC or Smalltalk chips? With ASSQ hardware, PostScript would really churn. rehmi