Programming Language Pragmatics

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• Excellent Compilers. Fortran owes much of its success to extremely good compilers. In part this is a matter of historical accident. Fortran has been around longer than anything else, and companies have invested huge amounts of time and money in making compilers that generate very fast code. It is also a matter of language design, however: Fortran dialects prior to Fortran 90 lack recursion and pointers, features that greatly complicate the task of generating fast code (at least for programs that can be written in a reasonable fashion without them!). In a similar vein, some languages (e.g., Common Lisp) are successful in part because they have compilers and supporting tools that do an unusually good job of helping the programmer manage very lage projects. (查看原文)

  IUSR 2011-08-13 13:19:01

• Economics, Patronage, and Inertia. Finally, there are factors other than technical merit that greatly influence success. The backing of a powerful sponsor is one. PL/I, at least to first approximation, owes its life to IBM. Cobol and, more recently, Ada owe their life to the U.S. Department of Defense: Ada contains a wealth of excellent features and ideas, but the sheer complexity of implementation would likely have killed it if not for the DoD backing. Similarly, C#, despite its technical merits, would probably not have received the attention it has without the backing of Microsoft. At the other end of the life cycle, some languages remain widely used long after "better" alternatives are available because of a huge base of installed software and programmer expertise, which would cost to... (查看原文)

  IUSR 2011-08-13 14:00:48

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