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

[Jon Steinhart]

Larry McVoy writes:
> 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.

I look at it slightly differently as the person who opened this particular
can of worms.

I'm not saying that the world should be fixed in stone; for example that
there should never be another language because we already have one.

I have trouble imagining how the features of C could be added to Fortran,
Lisp, or Cobol in a reasonably compatible manner.  And I have no issue
with C not being an extension of an existing language even though it uses
some of the features of other languages; to me C was the first non-clunky
programming language.  While I find C++ ugly, at least it uses C syntax
where possible making it a reasonable transition for programmers.

Going back to the original *roff discussion, I would have preferred to see
a ".2D" request for *roff that added two-dimensional formatting.

Guess what I'm saying is that I'm against change for the sake of change;
I'm not against innovation.