daveb@geac.UUCP (10/29/87)
In article <594@l.cc.purdue.edu> cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes: | I suggest that a language intended for library development be approached by | the developers with the attitude that a machine cycle wasted is a personal | affront. I think we will find that the resulting languages will be easier | to use and less artificial than the current ones. Implementing an arbitrary | set of types is no more difficult for the user than the 5 or 6 that the | guru thinks of. Allowing the user to put in his operations and specifying | their syntax is not much more difficult for the compiler than the present | situation. For example, I consider it unreasonable to have any language | which does not allow fixed point arithmetic. It may be said that this would | slow down the compiler. However, every compiler I have had access to | is sufficiently slow and produces sufficiently bad code that it would be | hard to do worse. | | I suggest that there be a major effort to produce an incomplete language | which is | 1. Not burdened by the obfuscated assembler terminology. | 2. Easily extended by the user. | 3. Designed with the idea that anything the user wants to do | should be efficiently representable in the extended language. | Well, C.R. Spooner wrote an article in '86 entitled "The ML Approach to the Readable All-Purpose Language", in the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems for April of 1986. This might easily fill the bill, although their origonal (slightly kludgy) implementation probably wouldn't. Details available on request. --dave -- David Collier-Brown. {mnetor|yetti|utgpu}!geac!daveb Geac Computers International Inc., | Computer Science loses its 350 Steelcase Road,Markham, Ontario, | memory (if not its mind) CANADA, L3R 1B3 (416) 475-0525 x3279 | every 6 months.