[TUHS] roff(7) [ and other related stuff ]
markus schnalke
meillo at marmaro.de
Sun Jan 2 20:46:33 AEST 2022
Hoi.
[2022-01-01 23:02] jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
>
> > From: John Cowan
>
> > Why use C syntax? What was wrong with Fortran, Lisp, or Cobol syntax,
> > extended to do what you wanted?
>
> Why do all hammers look basically the same? Because there's an 'ideal
> hammer', and over time hammer design has asymtoted toward that 'ideal hammer'
> design.
Hammers don't look so much the same, except that each has a stick
and a head. Seems this example is a too simple one.
Saws for instance look quite differently, even within western
culture, but even more between western and japanese culture!
> So I suspect there is, to some degree, a Platonic 'ideal syntax' for a
> 'classic block-structured' programming language, and to me, C came pretty
> close to it.
I suspect that this assumption is limited to our programming
culture. We can hardly think outside of it. That's for the same
reason, Europeans did not create saws in Japanese style -- they
simply solved the same problems in a different way.
Thus I'd rather call it one of many possible good syntaxes for a
classic block-structured programming language ... and within our
culture about the best one.
But as well, in such views we obviously like to ignore the very
suboptimal `switch' (good for compilers; bad for programmers) and
the not so clean optional braces for single-statement blocks. C's
syntax is by no means as perfect, as we like to see it, but
nonetheless, it is very good. (And I like it a lot myself.)
Btw: With the rest of your message, I agree. Good that we're not
stuck with one syntax (and thus with one programming model)
forever. ;-)
meillo
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