2024 non-fiction. Zinoviev introduces the core functions of seven
programming languages that are now, for various reasons, little-known.
That's the best and the worst part of the book, really, that it
is primarily a teaching document: to achieve thing X you use feature Y
with syntax Z. This is great as a foundation for learning more about a
particular language; however, what I was more interested in was
twofold, first some history of how the language was used, and second
how its features differ from those of more modern (mostly C-descended)
languages and what one might usefully take from them when coding
elsewhere.
The languages in question are Forth, Occam, APL (which may challenge
your etext device), ALGOL/Simula, SNOBOL, Starset and m4. The first
five could all reasonably be said to have come and gone; Starset was a
late Soviet development, rendered most interesting by its use of
unordered sets as the primary data structure; and m4 is of course
widely used in the Unix world, but rarely by humans.
There are surprisingly many small errors which I'd have expected an
editor to pick up: for example the SNOBOL chapter includes:
LE(n1, n2). Fails if the numbers are not equal.
even though NE (which actually does this) is listed in the same
paragraph; and an attempt to explain any/all functions (in Starset):
∃ ::= min(bool(exp(var)) for var in $set); # True if any is true
∀ ::= max(bool(exp(var)) for var in $set); # True if all are true
gets, as you can see, the min and max the wrong way round. (1 is
true, 0 is false.) Often a box with a light bulb icon, showing a
connection between the language under discussion and something more
modern and familiar, just reiterates text from the previous paragraph.
So for me there were quite a few frustrations, but some of them were
from the book's not being quite what I wanted it to be, which is not
the book's fault. It does a great job of explaining how these
languages function, and if one wanted to start playing with them (as I
have with PostScript) that would be jolly handy; it does rather less
to account for why these are germane points now, for reasons beyond
"here's where it started, and then another language took the idea and
did it better".
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