Re: [Axiom-developer] bootstrap Meta/Boot

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
> address@hidden writes:
> 
> [...]
> 
> | Writing Boot to generate Lisp is like writing Fortran to generate Aldor.
> | If you are a Fortran programmer you won't see why that's a problem.
> | If you are an Aldor programmer you can't imagine why that isn't a problem.
> | 
> | But you can't make Fortran programmers into Aldor programmers.

I guess I need to learn Aldor then just to prove a Fortran programmer
can make himself into an Aldor programmer. :)

But seriously, folks ... I was using Fortran as a scripting language in
the days when there *weren't* scripting languages. There were virtual
machines written in Fortran, AI programs written in Fortran, accounting
and finance applications written in Fortran, maybe even operating
systems written in Fortran. And just about every major large-scale
scientific application code written in Fortran implements a
domain-specific language -- in Fortran, of course.

If you want to have fun sometime, dig up Chuck Moore's papers on how he
created Forth. It was a merging of Burroughs Algol, Fortran and IBM 1130
machine language. About the only programming languages that *aren't*
descendants of Fortran are Lisp, COBOL and APL.