Subject: RE: ruminations on late-game design changes

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 May 2004 10:06:52 -0700

> once when praising the designers of Modula-3, niklaus wirth 
> wrote that the
> most difficult thing about programming language design was 
> knowing what to
> leave out.  i think this reasoning may apply to network 
> protocol design also.

Bad example. Pascal was an abject failure because it contained
a major design flaw, it was impossible to implement I/O libraries
as character strings of different lengths were considered 
incompatible types.

This flaw was pointed out repeatedly during the design phase,
treated to similar filibustering, rejected by the standards
committee and every compiler devised a separate work arround.

Most of the flaws of C that demanded correction in Java and 
C# were solved long before in Pascal. C++ could have corrected 
them if total backwards compatibility had not crippled the 
design. Instead we had nearly fifteen years of wasted effort
in that field until Gosling worked out the right marketting
strategy to get the field back on track.

Tony Hoare was an advocate of simpler programming languages
long before Wirth, and he also pointed out (repeatedly) that
it could be overdone. 

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