[HN Gopher] Wirth Evolution
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       Wirth Evolution
        
       Author : todsacerdoti
       Score  : 20 points
       Date   : 2022-09-12 20:55 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
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 (TXT) w3m dump (wiki.alopex.li)
        
       | microtherion wrote:
       | I think the author meant this to be a bit tongue in cheek, but if
       | one were to take this seriously, there would be much to criticize
       | about the approach. One big concern I'd have, for instance, is to
       | rely on the standards as reflecting Wirth's state of mind in the
       | design of a language.
       | 
       | This is a questionable idea for almost any programming language,
       | as the standard represents an endpoint in the design process,
       | rather than the starting point. It's even more questionable for
       | Wirth designed languages, as he was not very involved in the
       | standardization efforts. By the time Pascal was standardized, he
       | had moved on to Modula-2 which he thought had superior solutions
       | to many of the design flaws in Pascal, so he had little use for
       | standardized Pascal.
       | 
       | Furthermore, the languages themselves had quite a bit of
       | evolution over their lifetimes. Wirth and his team were very
       | involved in systems design and compiler construction, Wirth was a
       | big advocate for simplicity, and that philosophy included co-
       | evolving the programming language along with the system. Every
       | now and then he decided that some particular feature was more
       | trouble to implement in a new compiler than it really was worth
       | in practice, so he simply changed the language spec.
        
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       (page generated 2022-09-12 23:00 UTC)