"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:4adf12fc$1@news.povray.org...
>
> That must make me rare then. I can program in BASIC [I MEAN OLD SKOOL 
> BASIC WITH ALL-CAPS AND LINE NUMBERS INSTEAD OF A TEXT EDITOR], Pascal 
> (which is structured), PostScript (which is weird), JavaScript, Java, 
> Smalltalk, Eiffel (which are all OOP), Haskell (which is functional), SQL 
> (which is relational), and I have a vague grasp of Lisp and Prolog. I've 
> also written in machine code. (No, I don't mean assembly. I *mean* machine 
> code. I couldn't afford an assembler, so I assembled the program by hand 
> with a big book of op-code tables...)
>
> Did I mention POV-Ray SDL in there?
>
> The first langauge I learned was BASIC, and it sux. Even fancy AMOS sux.

Hmmm... lessee... Coursewriter, Fortran, COBOL, Pascal, Lisp, BASIC 
(Dartmouth, A-BASIC, GWBASIC, VB et cetera on and on), C, C++, C#, Providex, 
BBx, ZPL, Psion AXL, Forth, Prolog, APL (not much), Erlang, x86 Assembler, 
System 36 Assembler--

There's more but that's enough urinating off the port bow. :)

>
> I've heard this before. I never really understood why Pascal couldn't be a 
> useful real-world language. (Aside from a few obvious flaws which should 
> have been easy to fix.)

As originally designed, Pascal didn't support source code modules or 
including files, which made it difficult to write large programs with, and 
made it almost impossible for a team to work on an application. You couldn't 
make libraries to link to later, or use any kind of dynamic linking with it.

It can be (and has been) extended, but then you're getting into a gray area: 
"My language is the best, so I'm going to add in bits of your language to 
prove it." (Not saying that you're saying that, put down the flamethrower, 
please. <g> However, I have heard that statement used in actual 
conversation, in its essence)

Binary, digital computers can only do three things. They do them really 
fast, and can create some amazing things from those three functions, but 
still... when you get right down to it, the language we use doesn't really 
matter. :D

> Lisp isn't too hard to interpret either. (But arguably too hard for 
> 8-year-olds to program with.) Smalltalk is pretty easy to interpret, and 
> easy on the brain too. Prolog would also not be hard to interpret, but 
> probably not especially useful for home users.

What's great for that is Forth... you can fit the rules engine in about 4Kb 
and include the most commonly defined symbols. All the rest of your RAM, 
which doesn't have to be much, is available for code. Like Lisp, though, 
it's a stack oriented language, and I think that confuses a lot of the 
masses.

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