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- .NH
- CONCLUSIONS
- .PP
- Ratfor
- demonstrates that with modest effort
- it is possible to convert Fortran
- from a bad language into quite a good one.
- A preprocessor
- is clearly a useful way to extend or ameliorate
- the facilities of a base language.
- .PP
- When designing a language,
- it is important to concentrate on
- the essential requirement of providing
- the user with the best language possible
- for a given effort.
- One must avoid throwing in
- ``features'' _
- things which the user may trivially construct within the existing
- framework.
- .PP
- One must also avoid getting sidetracked on irrelevancies.
- For instance it seems pointless for
- Ratfor
- to prepare a neatly formatted
- listing of either its input or its output.
- The user is presumably capable of the self-discipline required
- to prepare neat input
- that reflects his thoughts.
- It is much more important that the language provide free-form input
- so he
- .ul
- can
- format it neatly.
- No one should read the output anyway
- except in the most dire circumstances.
- .SH
- Acknowledgements
- .PP
- C. A. R. Hoare
- once said that
- ``One thing [the language designer] should not do
- is to include untried ideas of his own.''
- Ratfor
- follows this precept very closely _
- everything in it has been stolen from someone else.
- Most of the control flow structures
- are taken directly from the language C[4]
- developed by Dennis Ritchie;
- the comment and continuation
- conventions are adapted from Altran[10].
- .PP
- I am grateful to Stuart Feldman,
- whose patient simulation of an innocent user
- during the early days of Ratfor
- led to several design improvements
- and the eradication of bugs.
- He also translated the C parse-tables
- and
- .UC YACC
- parser
- into Fortran for the
- first
- Ratfor
- version of
- Ratfor.
-