27 Sep
2014
27 Sep
'14
1:06 p.m.
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.
But he didn't have a good answer when I asked him if this didn't just push the
problem back
to the program specification, not to mention the problem that in "the real
world" specifications
received frequent modification.
Proof of program correctness is one of those things that I feel "would be nice, but
will /never/
happen for real applications".
Andy
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 ...