<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div></div><div>I've never understood why no one in the type-safety community has ever proposed a DON'T loop.</div><div><br></div><div>B</div><div><br>On 23 Mar 2016, at 08:14, John R. Strohm <<a href="mailto:strohm@airmail.net">strohm@airmail.net</a>> wrote:<br><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div>
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<div>I think it was Tony Hoare who told the story, in his Turing award lecture,
of how he once proposed a default type convention to the ALGOL committee,
similar to the FORTRAN default conventions, as an alternative to mandatory
variable declaration. The committee very politely boxed his ears.</div>
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<div>He later realized that mandatory variable declaration was in fact a Very
Good Idea, saying something along the lines of “Supposed the Good Fairy offered
to wave her wand over your code, and eliminate all bugs, and the only price was
that you had to key your code in three times. Would you consider this a
reasonable price?”<br><br>He mentioned that this was before the
possibly-apocryphal story of NASA’s lost Venus probe, because of FORTRAN’s lack
of mandatory variable declarations. (Supposedly, the story goes, someone
coded a DO-loop, and someone else managed to put a period where the original had
a comma. The result was syntactically legal, but not correct.)</div>
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<div style="font-color: black"><b>From:</b> <a title="Aubrey.McIntosh@Alumni.UTexas.Net" href="mailto:Aubrey.McIntosh@Alumni.UTexas.Net">Aubrey.McIntosh@Alumni.UTexas.Net</a>
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<div><b>Sent:</b> Thursday, March 03, 2016 11:40 AM</div>
<div><b>To:</b> <a title="oberon@lists.inf.ethz.ch" href="mailto:oberon@lists.inf.ethz.ch">ETH Oberon and related systems</a> </div>
<div><b>Subject:</b> Re: [Oberon] Standalone BlackBox programs was: GUI
programming inOberon.</div></div></div>
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<div dir="ltr">A strong theme in the Oberon community is documentation in the
sense of understanding or having an audit trail. A command that lists the
modules in the order that they are packed is very clearly documented, and
valuable for troubleshooting.
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<div>This is the same thought pattern that believes that variables should be
declared, rather than simply having the compiler allocate space, even when
spelling errors creep in, or believes that identifiers should have the module
name as a part of the identifier. Yes, it takes more crafting to author
the code. That time is recovered during maintenance.</div>
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