Re: The IDS, the EDS and the DBMS

"Lemming" <thiswillbounce_at_bumblbee.demon.co.uk> wrote in message news:nvbdk015210eubjql83vdif0oim3fbv3g2_at_4ax.com...

> Oops! I meant no offence - my remark about being "a dullard" was
> intended to be self effacing, I was acknowledging that maybe I really
> don't "get it".

No offense taken. I get into to trouble myself with self effacing remarks. Some people are all to ready to conclude that self effacement is evidence of retardation.

> All good things. Although if the language doesn't allow nested
> assignments then I'd say the use of the same operator for comparison
> and assignment won't have any impact on the above. It's nested
> assignment which is the bad apple, not the use of '='.

Nested assignments may indeed be a bad apple, but you can't prove it by the current discussion.

> >Back when I was young and smart, I could cope with languages that were
full
> >of quirks, like FORTRAN or assembler. You just used some of your
> >brainpower to deal with those quirks. Then, after years and years of
> >coding in poorly constructed languages, I learned PASCAL. It was
amazing
> >how much easier it was to come up with correct and useful programs when
the
> >language wasn't a distraction.
>
> Oh, Pascal! I'm a fan of Pascal myself although I've not had the
> opportunity to make my living at it all that often.
>
> Out of interest, does "proper" Pascal allow assignment within
> expressions?

AFAIK, no. PASCAL's mission was to provide a language where the student could learn how to program.

Nested assignments were almost certainly a deliberate omission, And Niklaus Wirth mentions deliberate omissions in his report on the language.

I lucked into PASCAL. I had been using ALGOL on a DEC-10. My job was such that, every now and then,
I could assign myself a programming project, without regard for language. ALGOL allowed me to think about the algorithm instead of the language.

When I migrated to a VAX, the nearest kin to ALGOL was PASCAL, at that time. If there had been a C compiler on that VAX, I might have learned C instead.

Nobody ever hired me to "do PASCAL". But people did keep me on board because of SW that I had written using PASCAL. And I wrote some tools in Turbo PASCAL for my own use on PCs.

Learning PASCAL as one's sixth PL is a little unusual. Most people who learned it learned it first (or second, after BASIC). But it was fun to learn it after so many other PLs! Received on Tue Sep 14 2004 - 13:42:45 CEST