Re: LOGO-L> Numbers or Words?

[tlbelding@htcomp.net (Tony Belding)]

On 28-Jun-97, George Mills wrote:

>Guess you never really learned Pascal then, too bad, it's a cool
>language.

I made "A" in the course, and was one of the top three in the class.  I
just didn't like it much.

>Working in C without prototypes is a disaster.
>And if you don't realize that then your not qualified to make such
>silly statements.

I've been working with C for about 12 years now, and it hasn't been a
disaster for me yet.

C was designed without strong type checking or prototypes.  It was a small,
efficient language -- hard to believe, looking at today's monstrous ANSI C
and C++ compilers.

>Working in a 1000 line program it can appear as just hassle.
>But when you start working in the 10,000 to 1,000,000 lines of
>code with 10-100 modules it becomes a blessing. I suspect your in the
>1 module 1000 line program range.

My current project has 24 modules and 1,596,162 bytes of solid C source,
not counting headers or data files.

>Egad! You code for living and don't understand the benifits of strict

I never said that I code for a living.  Programming is a hobby for me.

>Why don't you post to the Pascal related groups and let them
>know how little benifits there are to using Pascal over Logo.
>Be prepared to change your email address if you do.

It isn't a question of Pascal versus Logo.  They are in completely
different worlds.  Better compare Pascal to the *many* other compiled,
procedural languages that have followed it.

Anyhow, getting back to the subject of Logo...

You mentioned that Logo is poor at handling strings.  That made me start when
I first saw it.  After all, a string is a sequence of characters, exactly the
sort of thing Logo is supposed to be best at handling.  But then you mentioned
binary files, and the light bulb came on.  Of course, Logo would like to
prevent the user from knowing that "computery stuff" such as binary data even
exists.

I imagine you could do binary I/O using the ASCII and CHAR primitives (in
Berkeley Logo).  Work with one byte at a time and let the implementation or OS
(or both) worry about buffering.  Sure, it's going to be awkward.  What do you
expect from a language designed specifically NOT to do such things?  :-)

--
   Tony Belding
   http://hamilton.htcomp.net/tbelding/

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