[Tutor] Volunteer teacher

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

On Tue, 26 Jul 2022 13:19:23 -0400, <avi.e.gross at gmail.com> declaimed the
following:

>The way I recall it, Alan, is that many language designers and users were
>once looking for some kind of guarantees that a program would run without
>crashing AND that every possible path would lead to a valid result. One such
>attempt was to impose very strict typing. You could not just add two numbers
>without first consciously converting them to the same type and so on.
>Programming in these languages rapidly became tedious and lots of people
>worked around them to get things done. Other languages were a bit too far in
>the other direction and did thigs like flip a character string into a
>numeric form if it was being used in a context where that made sense.
>

	Why pussy-foot?

	You've essentially described Ada and REXX <G>

Ada:
	Conceptually define a data type for every discrete component (so you
can't compare "apples" to "oranges" without transmuting one into the other
or to some common type ("fruit").

REXX:
	Everything is a string unless context says otherwise. And statements
beginning with unknown keywords (or explicitly quoted strings) are assumed
to be commands to an external command processor (in most implementation,
the "shell" -- IBM mainframe mostly supported addressing an editor as
command processor, Amiga ARexx supported ANY application opening a
"RexxPort" to which commands could be sent -- even another ARexx script, or
(with Irmen's work) Python.


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	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
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