Re: On legitimacy (was: Q: F2k3 Vote Result)

Michael Metcalf wrote:
> "Gary L. Scott" <garyscott@ev1.net> wrote in message
> news:111p09kp845b5ad@corp.supernews.com... 
moved on
> to other 
>
> Exactly. This battle was lost in the late '80s. The bit intrinsics
were the
> compromise solution.

Since I know not ALL moved on (me for example, others in my area), I
say its never too late to open this programming domain back up by doing
it better than those other languages.

>
> Regards,
>
> Mike Metcalf

Hello,

On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 22:44:14 GMT, "James Giles"
<jamesgiles@worldnet.att.net> wrote:

>Dan Nagle wrote: 
>
>In other words, it changes the requirements.  That means that
>at least some implementations will have to change.  But, that
>really means that they'll have to have a compiler flag to continue
>to support the old way they're doing things.  This means that
>the committee really should fully examine what other existing
>implementations presently do (and whether they're bertter than
>the proposed "rationalization").

Why not read the papers and tell us?
BTW, the vendors generally support this one, IIRC.
 
>
>Then it should at least have KINDs corresponding directly the
>the character storage units and not require users of the feature to
>manually pack and unpack characters.

Again, read the papers.  There're different kinds of typeless.

>Your "all you have to do" is addressed at the users of the language.
>My "all you "have to do" is addressed a implementors.  If it costs
>vendors 1000 hours of effort, but saves 10,000 users 10 mintes each,
>it's more than justified.  You seem to think the trade-off works the
>other way around.  (Eliminating the need to pack and unpack binary
>data in my own programs will save *me* much more than 10 minutes,
>or 10 days even, over the lifetime of my use of a given compiler.)

You've missed the point, I'm afraid.

I never claimed that typeless does everything that bit strings do.
My point is that there's a _substantial_ cost difference between
the two.  And the vendors haven't been motivated to add bit strings
as an extension, so there's, apparently, little demand.

Confusing "benefit" with "cost-benefit" is easy to do.  :-)

--=20
Cheers!

Dan Nagle
Purple Sage Computing Solutions, Inc.