Re: A database theory resource - ideas

From: Marshall <marshall.spight_at_gmail.com>
Date: 19 Mar 2007 20:34:45 -0700
Message-ID: <1174361685.002881.173570_at_b75g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>


On Mar 19, 2:17 am, "Tony D" <tonyisyour..._at_netscape.net> wrote:
> On Mar 18, 1:53 am, "Marshall" <marshall.spi..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
>
> (Another one down the Google Groups memory hole. sigh...)
>
> > Oh, pooh. The problem isn't Kernighan, nor Ritchie, nor C itself.
> > There are perfectly good uses for a low-level programming
> > language. The problem is the legions who came afterwards
> > who didn't recognize C for what it was, and instead turned
> > it in to the One True Way.
>
> No, it's worse than that. Aside from C being a macro assembler
> pretending to be a high level language,

Ah! But C does not pretend to be high-level, nor were K&R claiming it was. In fact, the very book under discussion says "C is a low-level programming language ..." Again, I blame the legions coming afterwards. (What's the opposite of "vanguard?")

> the exposition of it in book
> form, "The C Programming Language", is a woeful attempt at describing
> it. It has no redeeming features - it isn't short (compared to the
> Algol-60 Report or the Pascal Report, which also do a better job
> describing the respective languages), and it is insufficiently formal
> (apocryphally, you could write 4 compilers which all agreed with some
> interpretation of the text but which all produced different results
> with the same source code - since they all "agreed" with the text,
> they were all "correct"). Both of these are fatal flaws in any kind of
> specification, and fatal to the max in a language spec. Sadly, others
> have been influenced by both the language and the style of exposition.

It would be culturally insensitive* to judge the book and the language by current standards. You fault them for the lack of formality, but when did formal methods for describing programming languages really get started? Scott and Strachey first began working together in 1972, the same year "The C Programming Laguage" was published. So we can't fault K&R for not using denotational semantics, can we? What *was* the first language with a formal semantics? Offhand I'd guess ML, which was when? ... It seems "The Definition of Standard ML" came in 1990, fully 18 years after TCPL.

  • or something

> > Cardelli? Hello? How have we come this far and no one has
> > mentioned Cardelli?
>
> Well, Luca Cardelli deserves a gong for his "Fundamental Theory of
> Management", I suppose ;)
>
> What about Robin Milner (and the rest of the LCF team) ? Or Dana Scott
> & Christopher Strachey (or even Joe Stoy) ? Or Peter Landin ? Or
> Robert Kowalski, or the joy of Clocksin & Mellish ;)

Good grief, how did I leave out Milner?

> > Peyton-Jones is uber-interesting. Wadler mostly just confuses me
> > these days; is he playing an elaborate joke on us or what?
>
> I did ponder that in Wadler's days at Avaya when he was doing the XML
> thang ...

Heh.

Marshall Received on Tue Mar 20 2007 - 04:34:45 CET

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