Programming Languages (was Re: [rescue] Solaris on a PPC)

[Brent B. Powers]

>>>>> "Sheldon" == Sheldon T Hall <shel at cmhcsys.com> writes:

<snip>

    Sheldon> I'll be happy if I never see another accounting system
    Sheldon> written in C ... or word-processor in BASIC ... or
    Sheldon> anything at all in Pascal.

Hmmm, you didn't get joy running Turbo on CP/M? Commercial Pascal's
tended to reflect the strengths of their makers. Microsoft's may have
been the worst I ever saw. The code (where a was an int)

     inc(a);

would generate the code

      mov      ax, varbase_a
      add      ax, 1
      mov      varbase_a, ax

whereas

     a := a + 1

would generate the code

      inc      word [varbase_a]

<snip>

    Sheldon> People have paid me to write in 23 languages, and they
    Sheldon> all sucked in one way or another, at something, at least
    Sheldon> some of the time.  Those 23 languages include household
    Sheldon> words as well as "dustbin-of-history" candidates like TAL
    Sheldon> II and DataBus, too.

TAL II? Wow, the command lines for those things were more complex then
some languages. HP had a variant of it that they used as a systems
language (the original 3000 OS was written in it.... it had some of
the funniest comments I've ever seen in an operating system).

    Sheldon> And what about P-Code, remember P-Code?  It was the
    Sheldon> "write-once-run-anywhere" solution at one time.  Pascal,
    Sheldon> the Java of the eighties....

I thought Java was the Prolog of the 90's?