Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GCC SC approves inclusion of Algol 68 Front End

gcc.gnu.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 115 posts

Re: GCC SC approves inclusion of Algol 68 Front End

#31

Post by gldrk »

0xpgm wrote: post #23

In my mind this highlights something I've been thinking about, the differences between FOSS influenced by corporate needs vs FOSS driven by the hacker community. FOSS driven by hackers is about increasing and maintaining support (old and new hardware, languages etc..) while FOSS influenced by corporate needs is about standardizing around 'blessed' platforms like is happening in Linux distributions with adoption of Ru…

The big difference is that Algol 68 is set in stone. This is what allows a single dedicated person to write the initial code and for it to keep working essentially forever with only minor changes. The Rust frontend will inevitably become obsolete without active development.

Algol 68 isn’t any more useful than obsolete Rust, however.

Re: GCC SC approves inclusion of Algol 68 Front End

#32

Post by keepamovin »

0xpgm wrote: post #23

In my mind this highlights something I've been thinking about, the differences between FOSS influenced by corporate needs vs FOSS driven by the hacker community. FOSS driven by hackers is about increasing and maintaining support (old and new hardware, languages etc..) while FOSS influenced by corporate needs is about standardizing around 'blessed' platforms like is happening in Linux distributions with adoption of Ru…

It's funny, I have a different view. Corporates often need LT maintenance and support for weird old systems. The majority of global programming community often chases shiny new trends in their personal tinkering.

However I think there's the retro-computing, and other hobby niches that align with your hacker view. And certainly there's a bunch of corp enthusiasm for standardizing shiny things.

Re: GCC SC approves inclusion of Algol 68 Front End

#33

Post by fithisux »

0xpgm wrote: post #23

In my mind this highlights something I've been thinking about, the differences between FOSS influenced by corporate needs vs FOSS driven by the hacker community. FOSS driven by hackers is about increasing and maintaining support (old and new hardware, languages etc..) while FOSS influenced by corporate needs is about standardizing around 'blessed' platforms like is happening in Linux distributions with adoption of Ru…

You nailed it. I am in the process in my spare time to maintain old Win32 apps, that corporates and always-the-latest-and-greatest crowd has abandoned.

Most people don't care about our history, only what is shiny.

It is sad!

Re: GCC SC approves inclusion of Algol 68 Front End

#34

Post by uecker »

keepamovin wrote: post #32
0xpgm wrote: post #23

In my mind this highlights something I've been thinking about, the differences between FOSS influenced by corporate needs vs FOSS driven by the hacker community. FOSS driven by hackers is about increasing and maintaining support (old and new hardware, languages etc..) while FOSS influenced by corporate needs is about standardizing around 'blessed' platforms like is happening in Linux distributions with adoption of Ru…

It's funny, I have a different view. Corporates often need LT maintenance and support for weird old systems. The majority of global programming community often chases shiny new trends in their personal tinkering. However I think there's the retro-computing, and other hobby niches that align with your hacker view. And certainly there's a bunch of corp enthusiasm for standardizing shiny things.

I think you both are partially right. In fact, the friction I see are where the industry relies on the open-source community for maintenance but then pushes through certain changes they think they need, even if this alienates part of the community.

Re: GCC SC approves inclusion of Algol 68 Front End

#35

Post by JoshTriplett »

0xpgm wrote: post #23

In my mind this highlights something I've been thinking about, the differences between FOSS influenced by corporate needs vs FOSS driven by the hacker community. FOSS driven by hackers is about increasing and maintaining support (old and new hardware, languages etc..) while FOSS influenced by corporate needs is about standardizing around 'blessed' platforms like is happening in Linux distributions with adoption of Ru…

> while FOSS influenced by corporate needs is about standardizing around 'blessed' platforms like is happening in Linux distributions with adoption of Rust

Rust's target tier support policies aren't based on "corporate needs". They're based, primarily, on having people willing to do the work to support the target on an ongoing basis, and provide the logistics needed to make sure it works.

The main difference, I would say, is that many projects essentially provide the equivalent of Rust's "tier 3" ("the code is there, it might even work") without documenting it as such.

Re: GCC SC approves inclusion of Algol 68 Front End

#36

Post by uecker »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #35
0xpgm wrote: post #23

In my mind this highlights something I've been thinking about, the differences between FOSS influenced by corporate needs vs FOSS driven by the hacker community. FOSS driven by hackers is about increasing and maintaining support (old and new hardware, languages etc..) while FOSS influenced by corporate needs is about standardizing around 'blessed' platforms like is happening in Linux distributions with adoption of Ru…

> while FOSS influenced by corporate needs is about standardizing around 'blessed' platforms like is happening in Linux distributions with adoption of Rust Rust's target tier support policies aren't based on "corporate needs". They're based, primarily, on having people willing to do the work to support the target on an ongoing basis, and provide the logistics needed to make sure it works. The main difference, I would…

The issue is that certain specific parts of the industry currently pour in a lot of money into the Rust ecosystem, but selectively only where they need it.

Re: GCC SC approves inclusion of Algol 68 Front End

#37

Post by uecker »

ofalkaed wrote: post #22
j2kun wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm pretty excited for this Aside from historical interest, why are you excited for it?

Personally, I think the whole C tangent was a misstep and would love to see Algo 68 turn into Algo 26 or 27. I sort of like C and C++ and many other languages which came, but they have issues. I think Algo 68 could develop into something better than C++, it has some of the pieces already in place. Admittedly, every language I really enjoy and get along with is one of those languages that produced little compared to t…

I wonder about what you think is wrong with C? C is essentially a much simplified subset of ALGOL68. So what is missing in C?

Re: GCC SC approves inclusion of Algol 68 Front End

#38

Post by FrankenApps »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #35
0xpgm wrote: post #23

In my mind this highlights something I've been thinking about, the differences between FOSS influenced by corporate needs vs FOSS driven by the hacker community. FOSS driven by hackers is about increasing and maintaining support (old and new hardware, languages etc..) while FOSS influenced by corporate needs is about standardizing around 'blessed' platforms like is happening in Linux distributions with adoption of Ru…

> while FOSS influenced by corporate needs is about standardizing around 'blessed' platforms like is happening in Linux distributions with adoption of Rust Rust's target tier support policies aren't based on "corporate needs". They're based, primarily, on having people willing to do the work to support the target on an ongoing basis, and provide the logistics needed to make sure it works. The main difference, I would…

The Rust Community is working on gcc-rs for this very reason.

Re: GCC SC approves inclusion of Algol 68 Front End

#39

Post by adrian_b »

Taniwha wrote: post #18
zik wrote: post #2

As a fan of Algol 68, I'm pretty excited for this. For people who aren't familiar with the language, pretty much all modern languages are descended from Algol 60 or Algol 68. C descends from Algol 60, so pretty much every popular modern language derives from Algol in some way [1]. [1] https://ballingt.com/assets/prog_lang_poster.png

I would argue C comes from Algol68 (structs, unions, pointers, a full type system etc, no call by name) rather than Algol60

C had 3 major sources, B (derived from BCPL, which had been derived from CPL, which had been derived from ALGOL 60), IBM PL/I and ALGOL 68.

Structs come from PL/I, not from ALGOL 68, together with the postfix operators "." and "->". The term "pointer" also comes from PL/I, the corresponding term in ALGOL 68 was "reference". The prefix operator "*" is a mistake peculiar to C, acknowledged later by the C language designers, it should have been a postfix operator, like in Euler and Pascal.

Examples of things that come from ALGOL 68 are unions (unfortunately C unions lack most useful features of the ALGOL 68 unions. which are implicitly tagged unions) and the combined operation-assignment operators, e.g. "+=" or "*=".

The Bourne shell scripting language, inherited by ksh, bash, zsh etc., also has many features taken from ALGOL 68.

The explicit "malloc" and "free" also come from PL/I. ALGOL 68 is normally implemented with a garbage collector.

Re: GCC SC approves inclusion of Algol 68 Front End

#40

Post by themafia »

adrian_b wrote: post #39
Taniwha wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue C comes from Algol68 (structs, unions, pointers, a full type system etc, no call by name) rather than Algol60

C had 3 major sources, B (derived from BCPL, which had been derived from CPL, which had been derived from ALGOL 60), IBM PL/I and ALGOL 68. Structs come from PL/I, not from ALGOL 68, together with the postfix operators "." and "->". The term "pointer" also comes from PL/I, the corresponding term in ALGOL 68 was "reference". The prefix operator "*" is a mistake peculiar to C, acknowledged later by the C language desig…

> it should have been a postfix operator, like in Euler and Pascal.

I never liked Pascal style Pointer^. As the postfix starts to get visually cumbersome with more than one layer of Indirection^^. Especially when combined with other postfix Operators^^.AndMethods. Or even just Operator^ := Assignment.

I also think it's the natural inverse of the "address-of" prefix operator. So we have "take the address of this value" and "look through the address to retreive the value."

Post reply on HN