Re: Style vs. transformation

["Brad McCormick, Ed.D." <bradmcc@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul Prescod wrote:
> 
[snip] 
> As soon as you describe the semantics of more advanced operations (like
> function calls, function declarations, reference passing, etc.) you have
> essentially shortened the list of languages that can be described as a
> "concrete syntax" of the semantics to a single language. Languages do
> not just differ in their syntaxes. The have radically different views of
> how programming should be accomplished. For instance think of an issue
> as simple as function call semantics. Some languages have keyword
> arguments. Some have optional arguments. Some have overloading. Some
> allow variable numbers of arguments. etc. etc.
[snip]

This is a really important point, where the proponents of one
"programming worldview" can easily try to impose a universal tyranny in
the
name of inclusiveness, somewhat like liberal capitalist economists
of the 1950s-60s proposed their world view was "an end of
ideology".

   * S360 Assembly language with its powerful macro facility is one
paradigm.
   * Pascal with its (what I call: fascistic) rigidity is another
paradigm
   * COBOL, Fortran and PL/1 ("middle of the road" workhorses)
   * APL (rigorously logical anarchism?) is another paradigm (John
        Backus's "functional programming" fits in somewhere around here,
too)
   * C is another paradigm (see also Perl)
   * C++ is another paradigm (and not at all the same kind of thing as C
!)
   * SMALLTALK....
   * The whole world of "regular expressions", which is foreign to most
        IBM programming and scripting languages
   * The "Weltanschauung" of if-then-else and do-while (with or without
goto),
        in contrast to all forms of what I call "declarative
programming",
        where, through "finite state machine" logic, use of integer
        arithmetic to compute logical values and table indexes, etc.,
one
        not only "elminiates gotos", but largely eliminates procedural
        processing altogether, so that, for ideologues of the "improved
        programming technologies" of the 1970s, there is nothing much
left
        to "waklk through"....
   * Vector graphics and SGML specification/markup languages versus the
        world of WUSIWUG (which, more frequently, is:
WhatYouSeeIsALLYouGet)

I'm sure there are many more Leibnitzean monadic "programming worlds"
floating around out there in the darkness, and, in my opinion, I'm
willing to
tolerate even the ones I personally do not like, (e.g., Pascal),
provided their advocates do not try to impose their way of doing
things on me (see Philip Kraft's fine
book: _Programmers and Managers: The Routinization of Computer
Programming in the United States_, Springer-Verlag, 1977!).  And
remember:

If "structured programming" was initially an object of intellectual
interest
by university "comp sci" researchers, its reason for gaining popularity
in
the real world was because it offered data processing managers the hope
of
being able to get programming done with lower paid, more
manageable, more easily *replaceable* emoployees.

\brad mccormick

-- 
   Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but
   Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world.

Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / bradmcc@xxxxxxxxxx
(914)238-0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
-------------------------------------------------------
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