on writing a while loop for rolling two dice

[Grant Edwards]

On 2021-09-08, charles hottel <chottel at earthlink.net> wrote:

> So what do yoy think or feel about a language like RATFOR (Rational 
> FORTRAN) which was implemented as macros?  Should they instead have 
> simply adapted themselves to FORTRAN?

That's an interesting question. If the langauge is complete,
well-defined, and well-documented then it's not that much different
than any other source language than gets translated into a lower level
language (e.g. C -> assembly). My recollection of RATFOR was that it
provided enough signifcant "features" that weren't available in the
underlying FORTRAN to make it worthwhile.

That seems to me to be qualitatively different than a set of macros
that simply make one language look (somewhat) like a different
language with a similar level of abstraction -- without providing
anything other than cosmetic changes.

--
Grant