Talk:Generational list of programming languages
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[edit] Multiple inheritance
Why is C# listed as a derivative of C, but Java is not? The whole premise of this list, i.e. that languages form a simple tree is a bit suspect. 0xBAC 06:56, 1 Aug 2003 (UTC)
An interesting idea, but I agree a tree is suspect—I think you can so a tree of principal influences and pointers to other. But where is Smalltalk? Where is Prolog? RPL? If we have VBScript, why not Javascript. What about Perl, PHP. Isn't SQL a language, other 4GLs. What about shell scripts- TeX- assemblers?
There are languages that, arguably, are created specifically in an attempt to "merge" the outstanding characteristics of two other languages. J is a good example: if one didn't knew that APL was also created by Iverson, it would be hard to say whether J is influenced more by APL than Backus's FP/FL or viceversa. I ended up listing it under both and making a referential note. Sure enough, if this technique were to be missused , the Generational list would end up being a Generational mesh ;-) --Danakil
- Indeed—the concept of multiple inheritance is rampant, here :-). Rexx, for example, has a strong syntactic resemblance to PL/I, with symbolic concepts adapted from BASIC and the PL/I macro processor, and many semantic aspects (few limits and system interfaces in particular) taken from EXEC 2. mfc
Worse: why is C# listed under C at all? There are trivial syntax differences between C# and Java, whereas there are major conceptual differences between C# and C. For example, C# is all-garbage collected; C is not, but Java is. C# compiles (normally) to a byte code; C does not, but Java does (generally). C# does not support RAII (because the 'finalizers' aren't called at any particular time); C does and Java does not.
I think the whole tree format is inherantly flawed for this information. It really needs a graph for multipule parents and cycles. C(99), for example, did take some inspirations from C++(98), which was inspired by C(89).
[edit] Concurrent Turing
Hi, There is no such language as Concurrent Turing. Turing Plus is concurrent, but it has never been called Concurrent Turing.
Jim Cordy (co-author of the Turing, Turing Plus and Object-Oriented Turing languages)
[edit] Dialects of BASIC.
In the languages that have descended from the BASIC branch of the tree, some of the entries are just BASIC dialects (eg. QBasic) rather than BASIC-derived languages like COMAL. Should we prune this tree from the BASIC branch and instead start a generational list of BASIC dialects? Ae-a 04:57, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Simula and ALGOL 60
Shouldn't Simula be listed under ALGOL 60? Kaldari 07:00, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
