Subject: Re: Newbie - 2 MORE Small problems? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 07:15:59 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3224906169639966@naggum.net> * Kent M Pitman <pitman@world.std.com> | Am I the only one who remembers PL/1 fondly? No. And I only used Subset G on PrimOS. (Some say it was even less than Subset G. I never acquired the skills to tell any difference.) | Somewhere along the way, it has come to be a metaphor for things bad. The whole language was _huge_. I wasted a whole month's pay on the language documentation, but it had many wonderful features. It was also extremely hard to get an overview over and hard to learn to use properly. I think it has gained its reputation from being so difficult from its "reverse pointer" concept, which had a particular name I forget. It was a true systems software language, however, and PrimOS was written in lots of languages that interoperated very elegantly. It is pretty pathetic that people need to ridicule both PL/1 and Common Lisp at the same time. It appears that large language throw some people off at an early stage and are considered bad by virtue of their size. I have seen people become frightend of English because of the Oxford English Dictionary in its full size, when they have only been exposed to some simple English Learner's Dictionary or something equally trivial. Perhaps it is some "fear of not mastering". /// -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.