Re: [boost] [git] Mercurial?

Subject: Re: [boost] [git] Mercurial?
From: Topher Cooper (topher_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-03-20 22:09:02

On 3/20/2012 9:31 PM, David Bergman wrote:
> This sounds like a "Turing Completeness" argument held by a Pascal programmer when hearing about that "cool" language called C a few decades ago.
>
> Ask people who have extensively used both, and they will tell you. C is better. Period.
Apples and oranges -- Pascal was invented solely to teach good 
programming practices, C was invented solely as a somewhat higher level 
language than assembly for doing systems programming.  Both were 
advocated for use well beyond their original intent -- and used 
successfully.  The Turing Completeness argument was an answer to C 
fanatics who claimed that Pascal was a "toy language" that was incapable 
of doing things that could be done in C.  There were many of us who used 
both extensively who felt that both had their place.  C was better for 
writing compact efficient programs (though no one doubted that the other 
contender for a high level systems programming language, BLISS produced 
much higher performance than any existing C compiler*), while it was 
easier to write clear, maintainable programs in Pascal.

Ultimately C survived largely because of UNIX, while Pascal was 
superceded by other languages it inspired for the same niche and others 
(such as ... C).

Topher Cooper

* I have to admit to some bias on that issue, since I was one of 
compiler writers for BLISS at DEC, and had been a sometime student of 
Bill Wulf at CMU before that.  However, the level of optization produced 
by the BLISS compilers (after the original BLISS-10) is pretty 
indisputable.  No credit to me -- we just extended the use of the 
optimization algorithms developed by Wulf and the grad students he was 
thesis advisor to, and used them in ports to other hardware.