[Info-vax] DCL's flaws (both scripting and UI)

[Simon Clubley]

On 2015-01-20, David Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>
> Some code similar to what's between the +++ and --- would have to exist 
> somewhere.  If part of DCL, fine, but must exist.
>
> I was just showing that some new fangled data type in some new fangled 
> language wasn't much different that what exists in one of the old 
> compiled languages.

I think probably the best way to respond here is to think about layers
of abstraction.

At the lowest level, you write code which runs on bare metal and you
get to think about (for example) which registers need saving according
to the ABI in use when you need to call an interrupt handler.

Somewhere higher up you are running under an operating system but
using lower level languages whose datatypes are modelled based on
the hardware typically in use.

A bit higher than that you have traditional problem area specific
languages which start to model datatypes in terms of the problems
the languages are designed to solve.

And somewhere towards the top of that scale, you have languages in
which the high level datatypes are decoupled from the hardware in use
and are designed to allow one to express some problems more compactly
at the expense of absolute code execution efficiency.

Going higher up that scale allows one to write code more quickly at
the expense of overall efficiency and as hardware has developed there's
been somewhat of a tendency to move higher up that scale for more
applications.

There's absolutely no reason, for example, why you can't manually write
an associative array library in assembly language, but you would be nuts
to do so these days unless you had some very specific and unusual reasons.

Likewise, just because a specific variant of a language was the best tool
for a specific range of jobs 20 years ago, this does not necessarily mean
this language is still the best choice for that same range of jobs 20
years on.

There will be some jobs for which that language is still an ideal choice
but there will also be other jobs for which other languages or a heavily
enhanced version of the original language are a better choice these days.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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