Re: Have we reached the asymptotic plateau of innovation in programming languages

Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson <johann@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>>>Personally, I'd say there's been precious little new in programming
>>>languages since Simula gave us OOP in the late 1960s.


> The ASCII character set has been a limiting factor for programming
> language design for decades. Here I'm talking about the interface that
> faces the programmer, not "language features" that enable buzzword
> compliant programming.


This has been a problem for PL/I for years. PL/I uses the EBCDIC NOT
character for the logical and relational operators. ASCII doesn't
have the NOT sign. ASCII has tilde and carat that aren't in the usual
EBCDIC character set, so one or the other usually maps to NOT,
but ~= looks more like an approximately equal to operator than a
not equal to operator. (EBCDIC also has a cent sign, which sometimes
maps to/from whichever of tilde and carat don't map to NOT.)


I never especially liked the C ! and != operators, but have gotten
used to them.


> Another limiting factor, not readily apparent to North Americans: the
> English language. Most, if not all, programming languages applied world
> wide are based on English, with keywords in English.


I have wondered about this for many years. I have asked people whose
native language isn't English, but it doesn't seem to bother them
at all. Of course if I ask them, it is likely that they speak enough
English not to see much of a problem.


Still, I once saw something like:


#define ALLEZA goto


Along a different line:


#define BEGIN {
#define END }


to make C look like Pascal, so maybe


#define FIN }


-- glen

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