I don't find controversy with Paul Gilmartin productive, and I foreswear it
from time to time, but my point here was that strong typing was
inappropriate to the HLASM. In making it I chose, ill-advisedly, to cite C
as strongly typed.
I did not mention PL/I. Now it is true, as Paul knows, that I prefer PL/I
and its dialects to C. I use it heavily for routines, often but not always
throwaway ones, that I alone will use; reserving assembly language for
routines that others will use, table-generation macro definitions, and the
like.)
Moreover, it must be conceded that analogues of such PL/I constructs as
declare phantom_cs character(32767) based(pcsp) ;
pcsp = addr(<whatever>) ;
and
addr(<whatever>)->phantom_cs . . . ;
which permit any sequence of [here at most 32767] storage locations to be
viewed as a character string, are now grudgingly available in C too; but the
much more commonly used C asterisk notation declares a pointer to an
instance of a particular scalar or structure. C is more much strongly typed
than PL/I; and Dennis Ritchie, its designer, has said more than once that he
views this as desirable.
My reference to C was thus not inappropriate, but I regret it because it
triggered Paul's here otiose reference to PL/I.
John Gilmore
Ashland, MA 01721-1817
USA
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