Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: any chance of 2.6.0-test*? | Date | Mon, 13 Jan 2003 11:54:59 +0100 | From | Horst von Brand <> |
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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 ;-) -- Dr. Horst H. von Brand User #22616 counter.li.org Departamento de Informatica Fono: +56 32 654431 Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria +56 32 654239 Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile Fax: +56 32 797513 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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