Bliss was Re: DEC program listing

[Huw Davies]

On 15/08/2005, at 11:12 PM, Paul Koning wrote:

>>>>>> "Huw" == Huw Davies <huw.davies at kerberos.davies.net.au> writes:
>
>  Huw> I always wonder why people think BLISS is such a bad language. I
>  Huw> know that many people inside DEC don't like it as they were
>  Huw> forced to use it as the new "standard" language but personally
>  Huw> BLISS is one of my favorites.
>
> Because it is so easy to write bugs with it, and so hard to find them.

I agree that missing .'s did cause some problems but I recall having  
to debug far
fewer missing .'s compared to missing equal signs in c. The number of  
times I've written
if (a = b) when I mean if (a == b) is the main reason I refuse to  
write c programs (not even
for money).

> The use of . is quite warped and utterly against high level language
> principles.  (The only thing that even comes close is FORTH.)

Well the everything is an lvalue is different, but in some ways it's  
easier to explain
i := .i + 1 to new programmers than i := i + 1 where the context of i  
changes (it's even worse
in FORTRAN where the syntax is i = i + 1 given that FORTRAN was  
written for maths/physics types....

Huw Davies           | e-mail: Huw.Davies at kerberos.davies.net.au
Melbourne            | "If soccer was meant to be played in the
Australia            | air, the sky would be painted green"