Re: Two Thousand and Eight

On May 15, 6:43 pm, Greg Goss <go...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> I'm not sure why I have some huge mental block on learning c.  The
> underlying philosophy (other than "Shave every keystroke!" and
> assignments buried within expressions) isn't that far off from PL/I.

I would be suspicious of that claim.  In fact, I am suspicious of that
claim.  My limited understanding of PL/1 is that it is more akin to
Multics, the which K&R and gang were revolting against, then it is to
Unix, which is where the philospophy of C comes from.  The idea of K&R
is to do things quickly and lightly, with room for formalism later.
Multics had much greater formallity (something later im****ted into
Unix when security became a bigger issue), and PL/1 seems to have been
especially heavy into formallity.

PL/M kept some of the formallity, but with half the language thrown
away as unnecessary, the formallity also became less burdensome.

BTW, I am one of those annoying people who likes both formallity and
lightness.  I also enjoyed using Ada (from the brown Grady Booth book
-- I have the "starry night" book, too, but never got all the way into
it).

/dps "late night confessions"