Re: Programming skills required by mathematicians?

On Jul 4, 5:58 pm, ju...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
> On 5 Jul, 01:18, Marshall <marshall.spi...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> > > > > > This was a fierce argument in the 1970s. Your side lost.
>
> > > > > That it lost doesn't necessarily mean it was wrong.
>
> > > > That the debate was settled decades ago and there
> > > > has been no meaningful question about it since is
> > > > a very, very strong indication that it was, in fact,
> > > > utterly wrong.
>
> > > The debate has never been settled. It's rather become a niche thing.
>
> > You are mistaken on this point.
>
> "No, you are."
>
> Anyway, please feel free to elaborate.

Why should I? The issues is long since settled. If there
is some squabbling on the playground still, that doesn't
mean the adults have any questions.

No major programming language has been released in
decades that sup****ts goto. (I am not talking about
something done by some guy in his garage; such guys
are still regularly reinventing BASIC.) We could perhaps
regard C++ as the last major one to do so in 1983,
but its goto could well be ascribed to C's goto from
1972.

OCaml doesn't have goto. Java doesn't have goto.
SQL doesn't have goto. Haskell doesn't have goto.
C# has goto, but no one ever accused mainstream
Microsoft of having taste. (And C# has no particular
market share, at least not yet anyway.) And F# doesn't
have goto, so it can at least be seen that the smart people
at Microsoft know what they're doing.

As Hudson said, "Game over man."


Marshall