On Thursday, October 31, 2013 8:50:27 PM UTC+5:30, Neil Cerutti wrote: > 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.
??? If I say: "My uncle -- a pilot -- knows more about flying planes than the Wright brothers" am I disrespecting the Wright brothers?? The state of art shifts with time. Fortran was more pioneering than most languages that followed -- does not mean it got everything right. >From Backus Turing award speech: --------------------- Although I refer to conventional languages as "von Neumann languages" to take note of their origin and style, I do not, of course, blame the great mathematician for their complexity. In fact, some might say that I bear some responsibility for that problem. http://www.thocp.net/biographies/papers/backus_turingaward_lecture.pdf -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
