Rich kids are into COBOL

[Roe Peterson]

> On Feb 27, 2015, at 12:30 PM, Guy Sotomayor <ggs at shiresoft.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Feb 27, 2015, at 10:27 AM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On 02/27/2015 06:29 AM, Peter Corlett wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> C does support bitfields, but can't take the address of one.

True.  Personally, I always found bitfields a bit cumbersome.

>> 
>> I suppose that it's unreasonable for a language to support processor instruction set extensions.  But APL does a great job of supporting vectors; has a syntax for things such as dot-product, etc.  So it can't be that K&R weren't aware of such things.

APL was very interesting, but every implementation I ever used was interpreted, not compiled.  It made for some pretty slow running code, even though development was very fast for some things.

In a slightly perverse way, kind of like perl today :-)

>> 
>> It seems to me to be very strange that today we're coding in a language that was developed for a PDP-11 minicomputer.
> 
> The frustrating thing for me is not just the instructions but the memory model.  Some of the issues (security springs to mind) that
> we're facing today can be solved by *not* having a completely flat memory model.  I'm still a fan of tagged memory.  ;-)

I'm not convinced that C can't handle tagged memory, but in any case, if what you need is real metal-level speed, well written C is very hard to beat.  The ability to include assembler is also occasionally useful :-)



> 
> TTFN - Guy
>