16 Apr
2020
16 Apr
'20
1:06 p.m.
On Sun, Apr 05, 2020 at 01:20:09PM -0700, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
[...]
well, close.
His BASIC quote is:
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students
that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers
they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
Here is one copy of his 1975 paper, "How Do We Tell Truths That
Might Hurt":
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html
I don't know what language(s), if any, that he liked.
Perhaps this quote will help:
(...) The Burroughs ALGOL compiler was very fast ? this impressed
the Dutch scientist Edsger Dijkstra when he submitted a program to
be compiled at the B5000 Pasadena plant. His deck of cards was
compiled almost immediately and he immediately wanted several
machines for his university, Eindhoven University of Technology in
the Netherlands. The compiler was fast for several reasons, but the
primary reason was that it was a one-pass compiler. Early computers
did not have enough memory to store the source code, so compilers
(and even assemblers) usually needed to read the source code more
than once. The Burroughs ALGOL syntax, unlike the official
language, requires that each variable (or other object) be declared
before it is used, so it is feasible to write an ALGOL compiler
that reads the data only once. This concept has profound
theoretical implications, but it also permits very fast
compiling. Burroughs large systems could compile as fast as they
could read the source code from the punched cards, and they had the
fastest card readers in the industry.
(from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems )
Whatever he liked, it looks that he optimised for speed of
execution.
--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola
--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... **
** **
** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **