?

[Jens Grabarske]

Skybuck Flying schrieb:
> "Prayank Swaroop" <prayank.swaroop at gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:mailman.166.1097236142.9839.mozart-users at ps.uni-sb.de...
> 
>>Hey  Skybuck
>>Its good that u r being so critical, but then u cud be proactive and
> 
> 
> Critical is not the right word.
> 
> Insulted is a better word.
> 
> Millions and millions of programmers use the java, c, pascal, delphi, php,
> javascript, ada, etc syntax which is all similiar.
> 
> Why in godsname should millions of programmers turn everything upside down
> just for this language.

First of all, these syntaxes are similiar, but not equal. They all have 
differences, some are subtle, some are quite obvious.

Smalltalk, Common Lisp, Oz, Scheme, Miranda, SML, ML, OCamL, Prolog... 
and the like all have a different syntax to the old ALGOL syntax (ALGOL 
is the "grandfather" syntax-wise to the languages you mentioned, so to 
speak).

There are good reasons for having a different syntax. First of all, none 
of the languages you mentioned are functional. Functional programming is 
a chapter on its own, it's a different paradigm than object-oriented 
programming, imperative programming or any programming style you have 
learned so far. It has a lot of neat and interesting features, but to 
apply it seriously (there's a little word pun for you you will 
understand when you have read the book I recommended you), you will have 
to introduce some basics in your syntax. And while you're at it, it's by 
far more convenient to use these building blocks to construct the rest 
of the language than to introduce the ALGOL syntax "just because it 
looks more like C".

Prolog is even a far more obvious case. Prolog is relational programming 
and ALGOL syntax wouldn't make ANY sense at all!

And last but not least: noone says that millions of programmers turn 
down ALGOL syntax. We did. And we did it for a reason. If you want to 
understand the reason, start learning about other paradigms apart from 
imperative and object-oriented programming.

Regards,

Jens

> 
> 
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-- 
Jens Grabarske (Research), DFN-CERT Services GmbH
https://www.dfn-cert.de, +49 40 808077-621 / +49 40 808077-555 (Hotline)