Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com> said:
> On 12 Jan 2003, Robert Love wrote:
> > On Sun, 2003-01-12 at 15:22, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> >
> > > No, you've been brainwashed by CS people who thought that Niklaus
> > > Wirth actually knew what he was talking about. He didn't. He
> > > doesn't have a frigging clue.
> >
> > I thought Edsger Dijkstra coined the "gotos are evil" bit in his
> > structured programming push?
> Yeah, he did, but he's dead, and we shouldn't talk ill of the dead. So
> these days I can only rant about Niklaus Wirth, who took the "structured
> programming" thing and enforced it in his languages (Pascal and Modula-2),
> and thus forced his evil on untold generations of poor CS students who had
> to learn langauges that weren't actually useful for real work.
You did not live through the horror that was FORTRAN IV, I learned
programming in it (no structure except DO, a primitive for). Sure, Pascal
strictures are overkill, but in a sense they were needed to implant a bit
of structure into the mess that usually came before.
> (Yeah, yeah, most _practical_ versions of Pascal ended up having all the
> stuff necessary to break structure, but as you may be able to tell, I was
> one of the unwashed masses who had to write in "standard Pascal" in my
> youth. I'm scarred for life).
And you do break structure only when necessary, so the dosis of Pascal did
you some good after all ;-)
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