[TUHS] roff(7) [ and other related stuff ]

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Jan 01, 2022 at 08:04:58PM -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 1, 2022 at 7:13 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > My big complaint with stuff like Rust, or even Go (sorry Rob), is that they
> > picked a different syntax.  Why not just use C syntax and extend it to do
> > what you want?  Why must every project redo everything.
> 
> 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.

C is beautiful, you look at the code and you can see what the hardware
will be doing but it isn't assembler.  It's what assembler wished it 
could be.  It's the right mix of high enough that it works over all
architectures and low enough that you see the hardware.

You don't see the hardware with any of the other languages you listed.