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Postings from March 2010
On Mar 8, 2010, at 06:23 , Carl Mäsak wrote: > commitbot (>), Brandon (>>): >>> + has $!age is ref; # BUILD will automatically use ref >>> binding, not copy >> >> Perl6 isn't done until it has reinvented Algol 68? > > Unaware of what Algol 68 represents in programming language history, I > perused Wikipedia's article on Algol 68: Actually, I was riffing on the 'is ref' stuff, since Algol68 did some interesting things with the "ref" keyword (and the way the language report described it was somewhat less than clear). And as such, it was a joke gone awry. (And as to it being complex, I'm tempted to invoke PL/I. It's less complex than most people think; it was just described *really poorly*.) Chew on this article instead of Wikipedia: http://www.cowlark.com/2009-11-15-go/ > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_68> (]): > ] ALGOL 68 has been criticized, [...] for abandoning the simplicity of > ] ALGOL 60 [and instead] becoming a vehicle for complex or overly > ] general ideas, and doing little to make the compiler writer's task > easy, > ] [...] The former sounds like the whining of a Scheme user; the latter, a holdover from ancient times. (What would the folks who complained about it not making compiler writers' lives easy have said about C++?) -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NHThread Previous | Thread Next