2 Jan
2022
2 Jan
'22
1:47 a.m.
On Sat, 1 Jan 2022, Larry McVoy wrote:
On Sat, Jan 01, 2022 at 08:04:58PM -0500, John Cowan
wrote:
Kinda sounds like me. Classic Microsoft BASIC, then QBASIC which was a
mutant freak dialect with structs, functions and stuff... started learning
C++ and then moved to C. I rarely use anything these days but C and once
in a blue moon QBASIC for something quick and dirty.
Why use C syntax? What was wrong with Fortran,
Lisp, or Cobol syntax,
extended to do what you wanted?
I'm almost speechless. My progression was Basic, Pascal, C (and later
Fortran, Lisp, no Cobol, I did an Ada Compiler so Ada I guess). Then
on to awk, perl, tcl, I tried to like C++ but couldn't, tried to like
Rust, Go, D, and couldn't. If you think any of those other languages remotely
approach the elegance
of C, I just don't know what to say.
This.
I think it blends terseness, cleanness, simplicity and ease of use in just
the right quantities in a way no language before or since has really been
able to muster. Its only real weakness to me is that it isn't very good
at string handling (the reason I sometimes kitbash stuff in BASIC still).
-uso.