27 Sep
2014
27 Sep
'14
2:03 p.m.
On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 2:06 PM, ANDY HOLT <andy.holt at tesco.net> wrote:
Of that list, APL is probably better suited than the others in that
regard, because APL is fundamentally a very simple language with very
simple control structures. Unfortunately any language well-suited to
proof of correctness of programs is probably poorly suited for
real-world programming.
On Sat, Sep 27,
2014 at 12:50 AM, Dave G4UGM <dave.g4ugm at gmail.com> wrote:
Dijkstra's key interest was proving program correctness (he was a mathematician).
All the stated languages had features that made this difficult - if not outright
impossible. On reading [Dijkstra's] quotes he sounds very
bitter and twisted about all the
languages in common use in commercial and scientific computing when he wrote
that quote (around 1975 I believe)...
He slates Basic, Cobol, Fortran, APL and PL1..
Because they all sucked, for various reasons. Being in common use
doesn't mean that they're good in any absolute ...