Re: Extending my question. Was: The relational model and relational algebra - why did SQL become the industry standard?

Lauri Pietarinen wrote:

>jan.hidders_at_REMOVE.THIS.ua.ac.be (Jan Hidders) wrote in message news:<3e6ef1b4.0_at_news.ruca.ua.ac.be>...
>
>
>>Bob Badour wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Jan is just being contrary to suit his emotional needs.
>>>
>>>
>>Absolutely. I get highly upset if I see all the sloppy reasoning, sweeping
>>generalizations and unwarranted assumptions in an area that I happen to love
>>and know a thing or two about. I don't blame Lauri for making highly
>>debatable claims such as that optimizing GOTO code is harder and compilers
>>for GOTO languages are necessarily bigger and buggier, because he does not
>>claim to be an expert.
>>
>>
>Also of interest
>is the Turing Award Lecture by Tony Hoare, which shows how
>"featurism" killed Algol.
>
>See
>http://www.braithwaite-lee.com/opinions/p75-hoare.pdf
>

Yes, and now I remember where I got the idea of GOTO's being hard to implement
and optimise. It was in just that lecture by Tony Hoare. Here is the relevant
part of the lecture. This was, of course, back in the early 60's so perhaps compiling and optimising techniques have developed since then, but I have the suspicion that what Hoare writes here still holds true.

[...]
As a result of this work on ALGOL, in August 1962, I was invited to serve on the new Working Group 2.1 of IFIP, charged with responsibility for maintenance and Among the other proposals for the development of a new ALGOL was that the switch declaration of ALGOL 60 should be replaced by a more general feature, namely an array of label-valued variables and that a program should be able to change the values of these variables by assignment. I was very much opposed to this idea, similar to the assigned, Go TO of FORTRAN, because I had found a surprising number of tricky problems in the implementation  of even the simple labels and switches of ALGOL 60. I could see even more problems in the new feature including that of jumping back into a block after it had been exited. I was also beginning to suspect that programs  that used a lot of labels were more difficult to understand and get correct and that programs that assigned  new values to label variables would be even more difficult still.
[...]

regards,
Lauri Pietarinen Received on Thu Mar 13 2003 - 15:36:52 CET