Re: Coroutines and Go

[David Given <dg@...>]

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steve donovan wrote:
[...]
> +1, that's good!  New languages are fun, but often they're 'one trick
> ponies' (like Snobol in the 60s was very good at string matching, but
> it lost its niche eventually)

[Warning: this message is almost entirely off topic.]

There is nothing new under the sun.

Have you seen Algol 68? As you might imagine, it's an Algol variant that
came out in 1968. (Which makes it older than I am.) It begat Pascal,
Modula, Oberon etc and is a cousin of C. (I think it's Lua's uncle.)
There's a good Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_68

It's a bit scary. It looks *just like a modern programming language*.
It's got C-like types (although to be more accurate, C has Algol-68-like
types). It's got user defined polymorphic perators (with user defined
precedence). Keywords and identifiers occupy different namespaces.
Identifiers can contain spaces! It's got block expressions. It's got
OCCAM-like concurrency (there's a par keyword for running processes in
parallel and built-in support for namespaces). You can use values before
you define them! Most syntax elements have a short form and a long form,
where the short form is designed for single statements and the long form
for multiline statements.

Example:

  # create a new type, 'vector', of an array of reals indexed 1..3 #
  mode vector = [1:3] real;

  # now create a matrix type similarly #
  mode matrix = [1:3, 1:3] real;

  # create some vectors #
  vector v1 := (1, 2, 3);
  vector v2 := (2, 3, 4);

  # create an operator that works on vectors #
  op + = (vector a, b) vector:
  begin
    vector out;
    for i from lwb a to upb a do
      out[i] := a[i] + b[i];
    od;
    out # value of last expression in block is value of block #
  end

  # define a matrix from our vectors
  matrix m := (v1, v2, v1+v2);

  # get a reference to one of the rows of the matrix
  ref vector horizontal = m[2,];

  # get a reference to one of the columns of the matrix
  ref vector vertical = m[,2];

There are a few features I haven't seen anywhere else, such as the
universal loop construct which replaces both for...next and while...end,
which I've never seen anywhere else:

  # loop in 'for' mode
  for i from 1 to 10 do print(i) od

  # ...and in 'while' mode
  while i < 10 do print(i); i := i + 1; od

  # ...and in both!
  for i from 1 to 10 while checkWhetherCancelled() do print(i) od

  # ...just loop, no counter!
  to 10 do print("Ten times!") od

  # ...minimum syntax
  do print("Loop forever") od

  # ...maximum syntax
  for i from 1 by 1 to 10 while checkWhetherCancelled() do print(i) od

Algol-68 has some particularly interesting pointer semantics, nicer than
C's IMO. This:

  int i;

...is actually sugar for:

  ref int i = loc int;

'loc int' is an expression that returns a new integer stored on the
stack. (You can also say 'heap int' to create a new integer stored on
the heap.) 'ref int' creates a pointer to an int. In other words, all
variables are actually pointers. Unlike C, Algol-68 has distinct
operations that work on the pointer and operations that work on the
value; most operators will implicitly dereference their operands. If you
want to, say, compare two references to see whether they're pointing at
the same thing, there is a specific 'a is b' operator for doing so.

Personally I think this is much more consistent and less ugly than C
(and Go's) approach, where you have to know whether you're dealing with
a pointer or a scalar before you can deal with it; but for some reason
it's not a concept that seems to have taken off.

...

So, to get back to the point: Go vs Algol-68. TBH, I think the
41-year-old language is richer, clearer and more expressive. It's
certainly missing some features, like any form of object orientation,
polymorphic functions, but the overall design is much more consistent
and well thought-out.

In 1968 Neil Armstrong was still pootling about in orbit and integrated
circuits were rockets science. Why am I able to compare a language from
this era with a contemporary one on an equal basis? Because,
depressingly, state-of-the-art in programming languages hasn't moved
much in those 41 years.

I think that it's entirely plausible that if someone were to take the
Algol-68 spec, redraft it in modern terminology (types instead of modes,
names instead of variables, etc), update some of the odder areas such as
transput, give it a catchy Web-2.0 name and produce a decent compiler
for it, then it would be heralded as the next great development in
programming languages. Which is kind of depressing...

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