11 May
2005
11 May
'05
6:38 a.m.
Subject: Re: Infocom on PDP-11
From: John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 07:49:09 -0500
To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
At 12:10 AM 5/11/2005, Tom Jennings wrote:
Humm, Computed goto.. Sorta like Cs pointer to function.
GOTOs are just another things that can be handy if not abused.
There nothing worse than QB45/dos using nicely structured data
and then littering it with gotos.
I've found most languages that can do something useful
contain cruft.
Allison
As far as sophistication goes -- a better measure
than simply how
clever or nifty a thing is -- how far did it advance the state of
the art? Good Algol's in the early 1960's look like stuff robbed
from the far-flung future. [...]
Algol had it's share of horrors, but man it is the basis for
nearly all modern languages.
Links for the intrigued... the report:
http://www.masswerk.at/algol60/report.htm
and an implementation for MS-DOS and CP/M, with source examples:
http://www.angelfire.com/biz/rhaminisys/algol60.html
Speaking as that voice from the future, reading ALGOL makes
me say "You don't want to do it that way." GOTO had not yet
been exorcised. Did I see a computed goto, where the expression
calculates the label? Eeek. Certainly it was a step forward,
but we've also learned a lot since then. When people complain
that computer languages haven't changed much, remind them
of the stuff that's fallen out of recommended practice.
- John