Re: Tree Sitter (was Re: cc-mode fontification feels random)

[John Yates]

On Sun, Jul 25, 2021 at 12:14 PM Stephen Leake
<stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org> wrote:
>
> Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
> >
> > The features that the DoD liked so much about Ada, to me make it feel
> > very clunky.  You have to declare so much!
>
> Yes, and then the compiler checks everything for you, so the code is
> much more likely to be correct before you start testing.
>
> It also helps when modifying/extending code; if it doesn't compile,
> you've done something wrong, and the error messages point to what to
> fix.

I started my programming career in the early 70s programming PDP-8s
and PDP-11s in assembler.  In the late 70's I joined DEC's Vax Pascal V2
project.  Coding in Bliss-32 was a revelation: high level control flow and
no longer having to do my own register allocation.  Still there were neither
true types nor function signatures (think original pre-prototypes K&R C,)
Once the compiler was shipped my next project was writing a bug tracker
in Pascal.  If Bliss had been a revelation then coding in strongly typed
Pascal was my "conversion on the road to Damascus".

On rare occasions I still end up having to write some assembler.  But
otherwise give me as much declaration and type-checking as possible.

/john