Error Testing

[Neil Cerutti]

On 2013-10-31, rusi <rustompmody at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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??

No, of course not.

> The state of art shifts with time. Fortran was more pioneering
> than most languages that followed -- does not mean it got
> everything right.

They obviously couldn't have gotten everything right; they had to
work largely in a vaccuum. but in no sense were they haphazardly
throwing syntax together. They designed it as well as anyone at
the time knew how. It's stood the test of time, too. There's
probably a lot more FORTRAN in use and maintained today than
Wright Brothers airplane parts. ;)

> 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

Thanks for that reference.

-- 
Neil Cerutti