Re: Quote of the day

No discussion of this subject is complete without a call-out to Mark
Pilgrim's classic “Why Specs Matter”:
https://web.archive.org/web/20051016203842/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/08/16/specs

On Fri, May 13, 2022 at 7:49 AM John Cowan <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 6:53 AM Roger L Costello <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> "Yes, working with the XSD specification is a nightmare; it's the
>> toughest spec I've ever had to work with other than Algol 68, and unlike
>> Algol 68, some of the apparent formality turns out to be spurious; when it
>> gets to tricky things that ought to be formal, like whether two types are
>> identical, the spec bails out."
>>
>> -- Michael Kay
>>
>
> "Since ALGOL 68 is a highly recursively structured language, it is quite
> impossible to describe it until it has been described. So that you can read
> this Introduction without tying your own mental processes into a recursive
> knot, it has been laid out to a certain pattern, which we ask you to
> follow. Please, therefore, start by reading once or twice "Very Informal
> Introduction", in which we try to give a broad survey of what is in this
> language - mainly by the way of small examples and plain explanations."
>  -- Lindsey and v/d Meulen, "An Informal Introduction to Algol 68."
>
> After chapter 0, the "Very Informal Introduction", you have a table of
> contents in the form of a grid.  There are 8 following chapters on basic
> concepts, declarations, blocks, functions, expressions, operators, I/O, and
> examples, each of which is divided into as many as 7 subchapters (some grid
> cells are empty) on fundamentals, procedures and pointers, operations,
> structures, arrays, unions, and miscellaneous.  (I have translated A68
> terminology like "mode" and "name" to their modern equivalents "type" and
> "pointer".)  You can read either chapter by chapter, which is more suitable
> for learning the language, or by subchapters in corresponding chapters,
> which is more suitable for understand its principles.
> <http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/>
>
>