Autocoding project proposal.

[David Masterson]

>>>>> Timothy Rue writes:

> On 26-Jan-02 19:38:38 David Masterson <dmaster at synopsys.com> wrote:

>> Whoa!  Shades of Emacs...

> There have been over 3000 programming language created in a period
> of around 50 years. That's alot more than human recorded language in
> all of mans history.

> Certainly by now we have enough to look at and determine what the
> general programming concepts are, as well as knowing such general
> concepts are by far much less in number than languages they are
> expressed in.

> As such, "Whoa@ Shades of...." can be filling in with most any
> programming language.

> But no matter what, you still have to:

> start/stop things

> keep track of where you are in doing things

> Get input

> determine where you are getting input from

> determine where you are sending output to

> do things one step at a time

> look up the meaning of things

> look up the identity of things

> Reduce you look up via constraints



> WHOA! SHADES OF EVERYTHING!!!!!!

WHOA!  Clarity!  He can be clear and concise after all!!!  ;-)

I agree with what you said.  However, there is one issue that you
overlooked.  People *LIKE* the language that they use or they wouldn't
use it.  Even though there is only a limited set of things that people
say or do in a language, each language has a certain "style" that the
people that use it find agreeable.  This applies to both human and
computer languages.  So, yes, all languages going back to time
immemorial probably have ways of expressing most (all?) of the
concepts that you mention above, but languages only die when people
find a replacement that they like (or are forced to like) better.

-- 
David Masterson                dmaster AT synopsys DOT com
Sr. R&D Engineer               Synopsys, Inc.
Software Engineering           Sunnyvale, CA