From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-08-09T13:41:32+09:00
Subject: Re: Language chatter

Chad Perrin wrote:
> perception that has grown from "we did it first" syndrome.  I think it
> boils down to the fact of Greenspun's Tenth Rule:
>
>   Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated C
>   or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden
>   slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
>   
Well ... I think I disagree with this, having written some moderately 
complicated FORTRAN programs and having read through many more. What 
they all almost always contain, however, is a domain-specific language 
that controls where they find their inputs, what processing the do on 
them, where they put their outputs and in what formats, etc., on what we 
used to call "control cards". Some of the parsers and DSLs of this 
nature are quite complex and rich, but they are in no sense of the word 
"Lisp".

Curiously enough, if you read Chuck Moore's description of the evolution 
of FORTH, you'll find something similar -- every sufficiently 
complicated FORTRAN program contained a huge "case" statement which was 
a "language interpreter".

By the way, one of the classic "demonstrations of Artificial 
Intelligence", ELIZA, was written not in Lisp but in a list-processing 
language patterned on Lisp but implemented in (pregnant pause) FORTRAN. 
But the SLIP interpreter, rather than being "sufficiently complicated" 
was in fact "delightfully simple."