[Info-vax] Rust as a HS language, was: Re: Quiet?

[Dave Froble]

On 4/4/2022 2:46 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 4/4/2022 2:07 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2022-04-04, Dan Cross <cross at spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote:
>>> In article <t2eo9n$mj7$1 at dont-email.me>,
>>> Simon Clubley  <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:
>>>> 1) The syntax. It's horrible and imposes a higher cognitive load than
>>>> it needs to when you are looking at something new or revisiting old code.
>>>> That means you are more likely to miss something or work a lot harder
>>>> than you need to in order to understand the code.
>>>>
>>>> One of the official Ada RMs/Style Guides/etc had it right when it pointed
>>>> out that you write the code once but read it many times. The Rust people
>>>> have forgotten this.
>>>
>>> Surely this is subjective?
>>
>> All I can say is that I've learnt lots of languages over the years and
>> the Rust syntax is easily the most ugly I have encountered.
>
> Ugly is practically by definition subjective.
>
>>>> 2) No official ISO or similar language standard I can rely on 5/10/20 years
>>> >from now when I need to work on my safety or general production critical
>>>> code at that point.
>>>
>>> This is a valid point.
>>>
>>>> Even though many of the Rust people appear not to understand this, the
>>>> lack of those guarantees is a _massive_ problem in the real world.
>>>
>>> But this is just insulting to the Rust people.  They aren't
>>> fools.  They understand the value of standards, but they're
>>> still evolving the language.  A standard will come in time.
>>
>> But other languages are also evolving over time, and they do it in
>> a way that guarantees the next language variant is just another
>> language mode in the existing compilers. That means I know I can still
>> compile code written to that old language variant in the years to come.
>
> There are no such guarantee.
>
> There are plenty of examples of breaking changes.

There is also things such as Basic+, BP2, VAX Basic, DEC BASIC, Compaq BASIC, HP 
BASIC, VSI BASIC that is probably 100% compatible.  We have code originally 
implemented back in the 1970s, which will still compile and run, correctly, 
today.  I will admit that the application has changed over the years, and 
finding some of that old code might be a task, but, it will still do what it was 
written to do.

Can anything be more valuable than that?

Is that something to desire?

> Because even when prioritizing compatibility it is easy to make
> something not compile - or worse compile with a different semantics.
>
> 18 years ago Java added an enum keyword. There were a surprisingly
> amount of code using enum as a variable name.
>
>> If the Rust language isn't going through a formal language standards
>> process, how do I know that I can compile existing Rust code in
>> 5/10/20 years time ?
>
> Rust is almost certainly going through a formal process. All
> major languages has to.
>
> Whether that process prioritize compatibility or not is up
> the people involved in that process.

Not the users, huh?


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David Froble                       Tel: 724-529-0450
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