SCOUG-Programming Mailing List Archives

Date:	Wed, 28 May 2003 07:50:44 PDT7
From:	"Lynn H. Maxson" <lmaxson@pacbell.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
To:	< "scoug-programming@scoug.com" > scoug-programming@scoug.com >
Subject:	SCOUG-Programming: The language debate continues

Content Type: text/plain

I came upon the F# (F Sharp), a Microsoft extension to C#, by
a different means. You will note (please!) its similarity in
form and function to what I initially presented with Warpicity
in proposing the development of SL/I (Specification
Language/One). You will note, however, that SL/I does not
adopt OO technology which F# (and C++, JAVA, C#, and .NET)
does. Instead SL/I "absorbs" OO technology through simpler,
i.e. less complicated, means, avoiding any possibility of
incompatible class libraries.

If we truly pursue a study of comparative linguistics in our
current programming SIG efforts, we have no reason not to
include F# along with the others. As part of that we can
discover by avoiding the "core essence" of OO technology we
can avoid the inventions necessary to overcome its
handicaps.

You have to understand that no programming language lies
outside the range of formal logic. The seemingly continuing
need for a new language simply brings in pieces of formal
logic not present elsewhere. Moreover you cannot introduce
anything not derivable from the instruction set of the machine.
No new language then offers more than what's contained in,
inherent in, or derivable from assembly language. The only
argument then lies in the form of macros, the HLL, built from
those instructions.

That Microsoft has chosen to build F# as a combination of
different forms should offer us a ray of hope, if not of
opportunity, to finally bring it to its knees. The open
source community can offer something simpler, more
powerful, and more complete. Microsoft is not capable of
removing the baby, i.e. existing forms, while reconstituting the
bathwater. We suffer from no such handicap.

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