Going the PL/1 way

[Dominic]

> I've got a faint idea that this "subset" approach greatly contributes to the
> unpopularity of Ada.
Well, this may be true. I do not know.
I have read some papers about the SPARK ADA subset.
It has been chosen so that they can prove
certain properties and be happy with most compilers.
For safety critical or embedded applications ADA
is not too bad. It is probably more often used
in this field than Python.
Maybe this can be changed for better.. ;-)

> And perhaps he might stay healthy longer than that young one who eats each
> and every new nutriment and colourful shiny berries. <wink>
Yes, there is some truth in here.
I knew you were going to write that. ;-)

Nikolaus Wirth must have had such an attitude
when he designed Oberon.
Aesthetically Oberon is a very fine language.
However if you peek into Oberon source
code you will often see that they have
used linked lists and rewritten the
code everywhere. Because they do not
have _generics_ and casting seems not
popular among Oberon programmers.
Purity comes with a price tag.

Nevertheless, I think Python has been
pretty feature complete and I am not
sure if @decorators are good or bad.
The addition of generators though
has helped me a lot.
I'll have to trust the Python
language designers since
nobody seems to have actual data
to support or discard @decorators.
As far as I know they are part
of C# and Java (recently).
Maybe some experience and data
has been gathered by them.

Ciao,
  Dominic