David Crayford wrote <begin extract> I programmed in PL/I professionally and IMO Pascal is a far cleaner language with more expressive features <end extract/>
and this is a sentiment that I marvel at. I view Pascal as a toy, a pedagogic language animated by very dubious principles. What I think of Pascal and our disagreement are not themselves important; but such differences strongly suggest that discussions of the relative merits of different statement-level procedural languages is an all but futile undertaking unless the context in which they are to take place is specified in advance and in great, irksome detail. Even then I suspect that differences of taste will make even modest consensus impossible to achieve. We are left with Justice Holmes's apothegm: If you like diamonds and I like rubies we have just three options: battle, compromise, or a jeweler who has both. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
