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Author Topic: Modula, Oberon or Ada  (Read 12626 times)

silvestre

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Re: Modula, Oberon or Ada
« Reply #45 on: January 14, 2020, 06:38:50 pm »
People are not machines, fortunately. A good language should help to write legibly, sensitivity in programming is an obvious path of bugs and clumsy errors. If you like computing, you will find that sensitivity mathematically increases the creation of insecure code.

IMHO case insensitivity is sloppy, annoying, and distracting. If you're writing code you should be instinctively in the habit of thinking like a machine. To the machine, "A" is quite distinct from "a". What's next in the evolution? A language that's phonetically lenient? In which "aisle" and "isle" compile the same as you dictate your code into a microphone?

marcov

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Re: Modula, Oberon or Ada
« Reply #46 on: January 14, 2020, 06:42:12 pm »
I don't agree with you, either. I could type { as fast as begin and the other } or end; should be automatically inserted by the text editor or IDE itself.

(learn proper two hand typing then)

Anyway, if the curly braces are not bad because autocompleted by the IDE, where does that leave the verbosity argument?

Oberon however is one of the languages with the shortest grammar. Writing a highlighter and some tools should be a breeze. But what to use it with ?

Afaik Microsoft supported component pascal with the first iterations of .NET.  So an old Visual Studio (2003, 2005?) might do.

But in reality, very few IDEs or text editors support these languages. I tried Blackbox Component Builder and I could conclude it's something from the Win95 era, as I remember it's not even has syntax highlighting. I don't know why they could even call it an IDE. The only IDE I think good enough is from cfbsoftware (cpIDE) but it is commercial with a delusional price. If I have to choose between buying it and switch to another language, I definitely choose the later.

Such things (hefty prices or over specialization for certain markets like Education or depending on the US armed forces (ADA)) are the norm if you go outside the most downtrodden paths. Even Xamarin once commanded a hefty price.  And that was C# even!

It has nothing to do with language, but simply being one of the happy few that big corporations provide for free to boost their platform, or not. And if you are not, you must find alternate ways to finance.

Which is one of the reasons why I am with Lazarus/FPC. It is one of the most complete truly free tools, and the tradeoffs just work.

« Last Edit: January 14, 2020, 06:44:33 pm by marcov »

del

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Re: Modula, Oberon or Ada
« Reply #47 on: January 14, 2020, 07:27:23 pm »
People are not machines, fortunately. A good language should help to write legibly, sensitivity in programming is an obvious path of bugs and clumsy errors. If you like computing, you will find that sensitivity mathematically increases the creation of insecure code.

IMHO case insensitivity is sloppy, annoying, and distracting. If you're writing code you should be instinctively in the habit of thinking like a machine. To the machine, "A" is quite distinct from "a". What's next in the evolution? A language that's phonetically lenient? In which "aisle" and "isle" compile the same as you dictate your code into a microphone?
Disagree. The compiler should be your friend, an extra "pair of eyes". If the compiler ignores sloppy coding, then the compiler is not your friend. He is your "enabler" of bad habits.

marcov

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Re: Modula, Oberon or Ada
« Reply #48 on: January 14, 2020, 08:04:38 pm »
IMHO case insensitivity is sloppy, annoying, and distracting.

Yes, and it HALVES the number of one digit identifiers to boot!

Thaddy

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Re: Modula, Oberon or Ada
« Reply #49 on: January 14, 2020, 08:44:28 pm »
IMHO case insensitivity is sloppy, annoying, and distracting.

Yes, and it HALVES the number of one digit identifiers to boot!
Furthermore it has a square root of that of making typo errors.  :D
Specialize a type, not a var.

del

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Re: Modula, Oberon or Ada
« Reply #50 on: January 14, 2020, 10:02:59 pm »
IMHO case insensitivity is sloppy, annoying, and distracting.

Yes, and it HALVES the number of one digit identifiers to boot!
Furthermore it has a square root of that of making typo errors.  :D
Maybe - but the compiler catches them before they raise further havoc as bugs.

del

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Re: Modula, Oberon or Ada
« Reply #51 on: January 14, 2020, 10:06:40 pm »
IMHO case insensitivity is sloppy, annoying, and distracting.

Yes, and it HALVES the number of one digit identifiers to boot!
True - but if you're using one digit identifiers (other than for indexing), then you've got other problems.

 

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