On Sun, Apr 05, 2020 at 01:20:09PM -0700, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: [...] > well, close. > His BASIC quote is: > "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students > that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers > they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." > > Here is one copy of his 1975 paper, "How Do We Tell Truths That > Might Hurt": > https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html > > I don't know what language(s), if any, that he liked.
Perhaps this quote will help: (...) The Burroughs ALGOL compiler was very fast — this impressed the Dutch scientist Edsger Dijkstra when he submitted a program to be compiled at the B5000 Pasadena plant. His deck of cards was compiled almost immediately and he immediately wanted several machines for his university, Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. The compiler was fast for several reasons, but the primary reason was that it was a one-pass compiler. Early computers did not have enough memory to store the source code, so compilers (and even assemblers) usually needed to read the source code more than once. The Burroughs ALGOL syntax, unlike the official language, requires that each variable (or other object) be declared before it is used, so it is feasible to write an ALGOL compiler that reads the data only once. This concept has profound theoretical implications, but it also permits very fast compiling. Burroughs large systems could compile as fast as they could read the source code from the punched cards, and they had the fastest card readers in the industry. (from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems ) Whatever he liked, it looks that he optimised for speed of execution. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **