C. A. R. Hoare: Language

C. A. R. Hoare is British computer scientist. Explore interesting quotes on language.

C. A. R. Hoare: 32 quotes2 likes

“[About Algol 68] The best we could do was to send with it a minority report, stating our considered view that, "… as a tool for the reliable creation of sophisticated programs, the language was a failure."”

The Emperor's Old Clothes

“[About Algol 60] Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.”

Hints on Programming Language Design http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/73/403/CS-TR-73-403.pdf, December 1973.

“[About Ada] For none of the evidence we have so far can inspire confidence that this language has avoided any of the problems that have afflicted other complex language projects of the past. […] It is not too late! I believe that by careful pruning of the ADA language, it is still possible to select a very powerful subset that would be reliable and efficient in implementation and safe and economic in use.”

The Emperor's Old Clothes

“[About Pascal] That is the great strength of PASCAL, that there are so few unnecessary features and almost no need for subsets. That is why the language is strong enough to support specialized extensions--Concurrent PASCAL for real time work, PASCAL PLUS for discrete event simulation, UCSD PASCAL for microprocessor work stations.”

The Emperor's Old Clothes

“[About Algol 60] Due credit must be paid to the genius of the designers of ALGOL 60 who included recursion in their language and enabled me to describe my invention [Quicksort] so elegantly to the world.”

The Emperor's Old Clothes

“Programming languages on the whole are very much more complicated than they used to be: object orientation, inheritance, and other features are still not really being thought through from the point of view of a coherent and scientifically well-based discipline or a theory of correctness. My original postulate, which I have been pursuing as a scientist all my life, is that one uses the criteria of correctness as a means of converging on a decent programming language design—one which doesn’t set traps for its users, and ones in which the different components of the program correspond clearly to different components of its specification, so you can reason compositionally about it. […] The tools, including the compiler, have to be based on some theory of what it means to write a correct program.”

Oral history interview http://hdl.handle.net/11299/107362 by Philip L. Frana, 17 July 2002, Cambridge, England; Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.

“[About Algol W] It was not only a worthy successor of ALGOL 60, it was even a worthy predecessor of PASCAL […] I was astonished when the working group, consisting of all the best known international experts of programming languages, resolved to lay aside the commissioned draft on which we had all been working and swallow a line with such an unattractive bait.”

The Emperor's Old Clothes