ftp.cs.arizona.edu/ftp.cs.arizona.edu.tar/ftp.cs.arizona.edu/icon/newsgrp/group93a.txt/000049_icon-group-sender _Thu Jan 28 22:31:57 1993.msg

Internet Message Format | 1993-04-21 | 2KB

Received: by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Thu, 28 Jan 1993 19:27:33 MST
Via: uk.ac.manchester.computer-science; Fri, 29 Jan 1993 00:09:04 +0000
From: Steve Holden <[e-mail]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 93 22:31:57 GMT
Message-Id: <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Removing entab/detab from Icon
Status: R
Errors-To: [e-mail]

I'm not very keen on all this talk along the lines of "you can remove
what you want" or "I don't use this feature so it shouldn't be in".

Anybody remember Cobol?  (Of course, none of _us_ use it... ;-)

This was sickeningly full of "elective" language features which the
implementor could choose to include or not at their discretion.  And
of course this didn't stop IBM and a few others building in vendor-
specific features to try and lock their users in.

Result? Total non-portability of code.  This is definitely _not_ why I'm
interested in Icon.  Those who want to cut it down or build it up may
by all means do so, as long as they don't then put programs built with
the resulting compilers/translators out as "Icon".  Me, I want to grab
other people's code and use it!

regards
 Steve

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