Re: You must read this

[Jon Kerridge <jmk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear All,

I have known Per Brinch Hansen for some time, since I implemented
Concurrent Pascal on an IBM 360 in the mid-70's!!

We have talked about occam on many occasions and he has a blind spot with
it because he does not like the syntactic structure.  He is a Pascal man
and invented a language called Joyce which was Pascal with CSP extensions
in the same way that Concurrent Pascal was Pascal plus monitors.

Dave Bustard was producing Pascal + at Belfast with Tony Hoare whicxh was
Pascal with monitors and made some of the same impleemntation based
arguments in its implementation that Brinch Hansen did.

I believe his paper only went as far as it did with history because he
wanted to make the point that the Java designers had gone back to
something fundamentally flawed and if they had only looked forward just 3
years from 1972 they might have a better solution.  They needed to go
forward 8 years to get an even better solution with CSP but that would be
not worth making as a point because they had so patently failed at the
first hurdle.

The paper makes several good point and perhaps a letter to the editor
about JCSP might be very worthwhile

Jon


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