The need for D-scussion (was Re: D Wishlist)

[Chris Torek]

In article <719 at l.cc.purdue.edu> cik at l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
>This is precisely what has made it difficult for mathematicians, and all who
>understand the computer, to make reasonable use of it.  To follow the desire
>of the Mikado to "make the punishment fit the crime," I would sentence all 
>those who would deny the right to use infix notation to others the right to
>use it for themselves.  It is the use of prefix rather than infix notation
>which makes assembler programming such a chore in 99% of the assemblers.

You must really hate Lisp, and Forth, and RPN calculators, and . . . .

>Furthermore, returning a list of values for a function is far different from
>returning a structure.

If so, the compiler should be improved.  There is no theoretical difference
(unless you allow variable length lists, but that is not what people were
talking about).

>As long as programmers are taught to think in terms of a language, rather
>than the machine, it will be difficult to get vendors to allow the forcing
>of inline.

As long as programmers are taught to think in terms of a machine,
rather than the language, it will be difficult to get portable code
that can be moved to that 1 teraflop computer that will come out
tomorrow, then to the 10 teraflop computer that will come out the day
after, and then to the 100 teraflop computer that will come out a week
from Monday.

(When someone finally builds the Ultimate Computer, the one that
uses infinite parallelism and quantum effects to achieve the fastest
operation that can ever exist, *then* I will give in on this argument.)
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7163)
Domain:	chris at mimsy.umd.edu	Path:	uunet!mimsy!chris