[HN Gopher] Wirth Evolution ___________________________________________________________________ Wirth Evolution Author : todsacerdoti Score : 20 points Date : 2022-09-12 20:55 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (wiki.alopex.li) (TXT) w3m dump (wiki.alopex.li) | microtherion wrote: | I think the author meant this to be a bit tongue in cheek, but if | one were to take this seriously, there would be much to criticize | about the approach. One big concern I'd have, for instance, is to | rely on the standards as reflecting Wirth's state of mind in the | design of a language. | | This is a questionable idea for almost any programming language, | as the standard represents an endpoint in the design process, | rather than the starting point. It's even more questionable for | Wirth designed languages, as he was not very involved in the | standardization efforts. By the time Pascal was standardized, he | had moved on to Modula-2 which he thought had superior solutions | to many of the design flaws in Pascal, so he had little use for | standardized Pascal. | | Furthermore, the languages themselves had quite a bit of | evolution over their lifetimes. Wirth and his team were very | involved in systems design and compiler construction, Wirth was a | big advocate for simplicity, and that philosophy included co- | evolving the programming language along with the system. Every | now and then he decided that some particular feature was more | trouble to implement in a new compiler than it really was worth | in practice, so he simply changed the language spec. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-12 23:00 UTC)