On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 10:20 AM, Neil Cerutti <ne...@norwich.edu> wrote: > On 2013-10-30, Albert van der Horst <alb...@spenarnc.xs4all.nl> > wrote: >> This suggests that Pascal went against established practice. >> This is false. FORTRAN used = and that was a mistake caused by >> the language being hacked together haphazardly. > > Respectfully, the designers of FORTRAN deserve more respect than > that characterization accords.
Especially considering the environment in which they worked. The core foundations of FORTRAN predate most language design research by a decade or more. From: http://math.scu.edu/~dsmolars/ma169/notesfortran.html#history FORTRAN "0" report - 1954 FORTRAN I compiler - 1957 FORTRAN II - 1958 ---> added subroutine definition and invocation FORTRAN IV - developed 1960-62, definitive report in 1966 ---> added logical IF, type declaration In contrast, Algol wasn't first formalized until 1958. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL#History ALGOL was developed jointly by a committee of European and American computer scientists in a meeting in 1958 at ETH Zurich (cf. ALGOL 58). Lisp also got its start in 1958 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_%28programming_language%29#History) In contrast, Python wasn't started until the late 1980s (1989, I believe). While it owes a fair debt to ABC, that language wasn't developed at CWI until the early 1980s. I'd like to see the reference for "hacked together haphazardly" in reference to FORTRAN's origins. Skip -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
