Language change and code breaks

[Chris Barker]

Kevin Rodgers wrote:
> I worked on a program where
> we were restricted to pure-ANSI Fortran 77 - including 6-character
> monocase variable names.  Yes, it was painful, but since a big part of
> what I was doing involved manipulating 4-dimensional arrays of data, and
> since C's support for multidimensional arrays is rather lacking (I think
> the technical term is "sucks"), I'd take Fortran any day.  Even
> something that you'd think C should excel at, namely concatenating
> strings, is much easier in Fortran (using the // operator) than in C
> (quick - write down the exact syntax for strcat() from memory).
> 
> These days, I only hack Fortran if I'm using a legacy code, but despite
> its quirks, one shouldn't underestimate just how well it served its
> target audience . . .

This brings up a good point about programming language design: While I
appreciate the features of a language that make it clean and easy to
read, and all that: basic functionality trumps such cosmetic features,
and that means that issues like case sensitive identifiers, indenting
issues, needing to use "self", etc, etc, etc, are tiny compared to basic
functionality. I always thought Fortran was ugly and often painful to
use...but it did handle some things required for computational
programming (multi-dimentionial arrays are big one) well, and thus it
lives on!. In fact, I think that if Fortran 77 introduced dynamic memory
allocation, it would be living even larger than it is: that was kind of
a deal killer for a lot of stuff. By the way, Fortran 90/95 is pretty
darn nice language.

As a matter of fact, I like Python a lot, for a lot of reasons, but I
would not be using it at all if it were not for NumPy.

To make this relevant to recent discussions:

Case sensitivity is a purely cosmetic issue, There is no reason to make
a major language change for cosmetic reasons.

I think the proposed new division is a functional difference, not a
cosmetic one. Having a syntax that makes it clear whether you want an
integer answer or not, regardless of the types of the inputs is very
important in a dynamic language.

Anyway, on with the show!!!

-Chris


-- 
Christopher Barker,
Ph.D.                                                           
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