Re: LOGO-L> Numbers or Words?

[George Mills <mills@softronix.com>]

Tony Belding wrote:
> 
> 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.
>

Ooooh, you must of got really deep into the language in 4 months
compared
to your 12 years of C.

It's not a question of liking it or not, I'm talking about technical
reasons why it is an inferior language to C or Logo.

How much did the course cover Case Varient Records in Pascal.

> 
> >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.

Sorry.

> 
> >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.
>

That was the subject that started this thread.

> 
> 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.
> 

There are some neat things you can do with text in Logo.
But there are many things that are hard. Like writing a columnized
report with leading zeros, fixed precision, dealing with "white space"
is awkward. However UCBLogo/MSWLogo can do it, because it sort of
cheated by allowing access to C's formated print statement.
Which by the way is not really part of the "C language" but its
addon runtime library.

> 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?  :-)
> 

Have fun, have fun seeking around in the file as well.

When you have to do high performance tasks you often need to deal with
huge amounts of data quickly and dealing with huge amounts of data in
ascii
is often impractical. Not using a language compiled to native
instructions
is also required for most applications.

That's a weakness in Logo, not a problem as a teaching language
but it is a weakness compared to Pascal or C.

And there are of course things in Logo which can be done easier than
in C or Pascal.

All I'm saying is each language has it strengths and weaknesses.
And that it is niave to make a blanket statement that Pascal has no
benifits to Logo or even C.

Is that so difficult to accept?

Cobol and Fortran (still one of the most widely used languages) even
have some strengths and weaknesses compared to other languages.

There is no one language that does everything right.

> --
>    Tony Belding
>    http://hamilton.htcomp.net/tbelding/
> 
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-- 
===============================================================
George Mills (mills@softronix.com)
http://www.softronix.com/
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