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From: David Gay <dgay@beryl.CS.Berkeley.EDU>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: ADA Popularity Discussion Request
Date: 14 Sep 2004 13:17:34 -0700
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Kilgallen@SpamCop.net (Larry Kilgallen) writes:
> In article <mailman.24.1095085542.390.comp.lang.ada@ada-france.org>, Marius Amado Alves <amado.alves@netcabo.pt> writes:
> >>>FWIW, I believe the main factor of C success was (is) the simplicity of 
> >>>its semantics.
> >> 
> >> It is certainly no simpler than Bliss, but much more popular.
> > 
> > C is simpler. At least with respect to compilation.
> 
> Presuming you mean simplicity of compiler design, that is irrelevant
> to the belief statement, which was "simplicity of its semantics".

I disagree completely. Without any other information, I would always assume
that a language with simpler semantics would have a simpler compiler. Hence, 
a simpler compiler is a reasonable indicator of simpler semantics. This is, 
of course, not a direct link, as some semantic concepts might be harder to
implement on actual hardware, but claiming there is no link is clearly wrong.

-- 
David Gay
dgay@acm.org