[TUHS] : C dialects (was: I can't drive 55: "GOTO considered harmful" 55th anniversary)
John Cowan
cowan at ccil.org
Tue Mar 14 10:38:09 AEST 2023
On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 5:00 PM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
wrote:
Dropping toxic features from a language does happen at standards
> committees, but it's rare. The best case I know of where this
> happened was when the international standard for PL/I came out. They
> started with IBM PL/I but then dropped a bunch of features that were
> either obsolete (e.g., sterling pictures) or downright dangerous
> (e.g., the DEFAULT statement).
>
That actually happened twice. The 1976 standard removed features from IBM
PL/I; the 1981 Subset G standard removed even more features. (A few were
added back in the 1987 revision of Subset G.)
> On the other side of the spectrum you have the BASIC standards
> committee. BASIC has always had to live down a reputation that it's a
> "toy language" not suitable for "serious programming". The standards
> committee seems to have suffered from an inferiority complex, and it
> seemed from my perspective that as fast as the PL/I committee chucked
> out toxic language, the BASIC committee adopted them.
There are two Basic standards as well: the smaller one came first.
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