Cousin Stanley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: ... > > I think the Original Sin in that regard was PL/I: it tried to have all ... > > tended to have two or more ways to perform any given task, typically > > inspired by some of the existing languages, often with the addition of > > new ones made out of whole cloth. ... > Cousin Alex .... > > With regards to PL/I a phrase from an old ( 1969 ) song > named "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" comes to mind .... > > Ya take what you need and ya leave the rest .... > > I really liked programming in pl/1
I didn't -- been there, hated that. Each project group ended up defining (formally or informally) the subset of PL/I it was using -- and when one had to work with multiple groups, it became yet one more nightmare to recall which features were in the subset of which group(s). If there are just 30 "operations", for each of which the language offers two ways to perform it, that one language becomes over a billion languages when "subsetted" by picking just one choice for each of the operations. Absolutely crazy -- total and utter waste of effort on the part of every programmer, every group, every compiler author. PL/1 is basically gone, but its legacy of "take what you need and leave the rest" is unfortunately alive in other languages that are blind to the enormous advantages of simplicity and uniformity. Alex -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
