 Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal
started 12/17/2001; 10:37:47 AM - last post 12/19/2001; 3:32:24 PM
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Ehud Lamm - Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal 
12/17/2001; 10:37:47 AM (reads: 1824, responses: 3)
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Frank Atanassow - Re: Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal
12/17/2001; 1:37:22 PM (reads: 959, responses: 0)
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Nicklaus Wirth, the designer of Pascal, gave a talk once at which he was asked, "How do you pronounce your name?". He replied, "You can either call me by name, pronouncing it 'Veert', or call me by value, 'Worth'." One can tell immediately by this comment that Nicklaus Wirth is a Quiche Eater. The only parameter passing mechanism endorsed by Real Programmers is call-by-value-return
This is a good story, but it may be interesting to note that call-by-value and call-by-name are actually formal duals. There are a pair of continuation-passing style transformations between CBV and CBN languages, which IIRC are adjoint, and thus invertible in a weak sense. This has been exploited recently in a paper by Curien and Herbelin The Duality of Computation. This paper is quite technical, but the introduction is relatively accessible.
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Luke Gorrie - Re: Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal
12/17/2001; 8:59:00 PM (reads: 932, responses: 0)
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Paul F Dubois <...@home.com> wrote:
> Stereotyping Fortran programmers as somehow less likely than anyone else
> to learn something new is unlikely to produce any insight.
C YES I AGREE. I STARTED OUT PROGRAMMING IN FORTRAN ON A TOPS-10 S 000100
C YSTEM AND OTHER SIMILAR MACHINES. ALTHOUGH, I MUST ADMIT, I STIL 000200
C L HAVE SOME BAD HABITS I PICKED UP FROM THOSE OLD DAYS, BY AND LA 000300
C RGE I BELIEVE I HAVE OVERCOME MOST OF THE WORST ONES. 000400
--
Roy Smith <...@popmail.med.nyu.edu>
New York University School of Medicine
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Frank Atanassow - Re: Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal
12/19/2001; 3:32:24 PM (reads: 873, responses: 0)
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lol
(Nice that you give credit, BTW.)
Hard to imagine that people actually programmed this way once (I'm 28). But I still remember attaching program line numbers to every statement in Apple ][e's BASIC.
It's amazing how deeply people are conditioned by programming languages. When I was about 15, I went to a user meeting of Wayne Bell's Original WWIV BBS (some people will recall that this is, along with Fidonet, one of the first networked BBSes---in fact, they interoperated at one time) in Los Angeles and, as a prank, Wayne would go around to all the software stores, break into monitor on the Apples on display, and type in the equivalent of a 10 print "Hello!" 20 goto 10 program--- by poking it into machine hexcode! He knew it by heart.
Amazing!
Depressing?
Maybe there is some truth to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
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