On Wednesday, May 6, 2015 at 6:41:38 PM UTC+5:30, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote: > On Tue, 5 May 2015 21:47:17 -0700 (PDT), Rustom Mody declaimed the following: > > >If the classic Pascal (or Fortran or Basic) sibling balanced abstractions of > >function-for-value > >procedure-for-effect were more in the collective consciousness rather than > >C's > >travesty of function, things might not have been so messy. > > > I suspect just the term "subprogram" (as in "function subprogram" and > "subroutine subprogram") would confuse a lot of cubs these days... > > >C didn't start the mess of mixing procedure and function -- Lisp/Apl did. > >Nor the confusion of = for assignment; Fortran did that. > > I don't think you can blame FORTRAN for that, given that it was one of > the first of the higher level languages, and had no confusion internally...
BLAME?? Ha You are being funny Dennis! There are fat regulation-books that pilots need to follow. Breaking them can make one culpable all the way to homicide. The Wright-brothers probably broke them all. Should we call them homicidal maniacs? Shakespeare sometimes has funny spellings. I guess he's illiterate for not turning on the spell-checker in Word? Or [my favorite] Abraham Lincoln used the word 'negro'. So he's a racist? Speaking more conceptually, there are pioneers and us ordinary folks.ยน The world as we know it is largely a creation of these pioneers. And if you take them and stuff them into the statistically ordinary mold then fit badly. That puts people especially teachers into a bind. If I expect my students to be 1/100 as pioneering as Backus, Thomson, Ritchie etc, I would be foolish And if I dont spell out all their mistakes in minute detail and pull them up for repeating them, I'd not be doing due diligence -------------------- I guess this is nowadays called the 'romantic' view. Ask the family-members of any of these greats for the 'other' view :-) -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
