Douglas Seay <seay@absyss.fr> writes:
>I'll agree that they aren't ivory tower languages, and that the language
>specification may have been created hand-in-hand with the tool, but I
>don't see how that makes them less of "languages". This m ight be
>ancient history, but was there a formal specification of COBOL, FORTRAN
>or APL before the first implementation?]
COBOL - yes. (COBOL was "designed by committee".)
Fortran - I _think_ the answer is 'yes'.
APL - most certainly! Iverson's book preceded the implementation.
Well, the specifications may not be up to _today's_ formal specifications,
but they were as formal as anything around at the time except perhaps
McCarthy's papers.
>PS - The syntax of perl5 is actually simplier than perl4. The thing
>that got bigger was the libraries. But since it is no longer "cute", I
>couldn't expect you to keep up with it.
The syntax may be simpler, but the manuals got a whole lot bigger, and
some of the perl4 code I had bought stopped working.
--
Will maintain COBOL for money.
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/%7Eok; RMIT Comp.Sci.
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