Path: news.cs.au.dk!not-for-mail From: "\[tricos.com\] Sascha Kimmel" Newsgroups: comp.lang.beta Subject: RE: Beta and GTK ? Date: 7 Nov 1999 14:33:41 -0000 Organization: University of Aarhus, Department of Computer Science (DAIMI) Lines: 104 Approved: mailtonews@cs.au.dk Distribution: world Message-ID: <19991107143341.21368.qmail@noatun.mjolner.dk> Reply-To: "\[tricos.com\] Sascha Kimmel" NNTP-Posting-Host: daimi.cs.au.dk X-Trace: xinwen.cs.au.dk 941985237 8816618 255.255.255.255 (7 Nov 1999 14:33:57 GMT) X-Complaints-To: news@cs.au.dk NNTP-Posting-Date: 7 Nov 1999 14:33:57 GMT Xref: news.cs.au.dk comp.lang.beta:12149 > Hello Beta-people ! Hello Florian! > First I would like to mention that Beta is really a bad name. > Especially > with search-engines like altavista. JFYI (from the BETA FAQ: ~/beta/doc/faq/beta-language-faq.html#Q18): >>>>>>>>>> Q18) What is the origin of the name BETA? [Ole Lehrmann Madsen (olm@cs.au.dk) writes:] Originally Beta was just one of a series of languages developed at Nordic universities. The first object-oriented language Simula was originally designed as a simulation language but it was soon realised that the main ideas could be used for programming in general and this lead to Simula 67, which has class, subclass, virtual function coroutines, etc. It also supplied the first object-oriented framework in the form of Class Simulation which is a set of classes to support the original goal of Simula to write simulation programs. It turned out that many users of Simula seemed to get more understanding of their problem domain by having to develop a model using Simula than of the actual simulation results. Kristen Nygaard and others then decided to develop a successor for Simula, but with main focus of system description - not execution. This lead to a language called Delta In Delta you could express true concurrent objects and use predicates to express state changes. Delta could, however, not be executed. Delta means 'participate' in Norwegian'. [E. Holbaek-Hannsen, P Haandlykken, K. Nygaard: System Description and the Delta Language. Norwegian Computing Center, Publ. no 523, 1973] When Kristen Nygaard was a visiting professor at Aarhus University in 1973-75, a project was started to develop a programming language based on the Delta ideas. This language should be a (programming language) successor to Simula and was called Gamma In the seventies, it was often assumed that a general programming language was not usable as a systems programming langauge. It was therefore decided to define a systems programming langauge which should also be used to implement Gamma. This language was called BETA Finally the machine level languages were referred to as Alpha Long story:-) So what happened to Delta and Gamma? There is a (big) report describing Delta and there has later been some related work on Delta including using it in a few projects, but it is no longer being used or developed. The language Epsilon was a simplified version of Delta and the result of attempts to formalize Delta by means of Petri Nets. The Gamma language was never developed. During the work on Beta it was soon realized that there was no need for Gamma. It turned out that by having powerful abstraction mechanisms in Beta, the Gamma-level could be handled by supplying class libraries and frameworks. You may thus think on the Gamma-level as the libraries and frameworks of the Mjølner System. And this is where we are today. Some of the stuff in Delta could be handled by adding constraints to BETA and supporting invariants and pre/post conditions. (The idea of invariants and pre/post conditions for classes were originally suggested by Tony Hoare for Simula. [C.A.R. Hoare: Proof of correctness of data representation, Acta Informatics, 4, 271-281, 1972] The Mjølner System has some libraries supporting initial versions of constraints and invariants. It has often discussed changing the name BETA - to avoid the beta-testing jokes. The suggestion for a name change is Scala - Scandinavian Language and also Scala means 'going up'... But so far it has been decided to stick with Beta. <<<<<<<<<< Maybe you get better results when using AltaVista if you do not only type "BETA"? ;-) Regards, Sascha Kimmel -------------------------------------------------- tricos.com MEDIASERVICE http://www.tricos.com brave new web http://www.bravenewweb.net Lover's Paradise http://www.loversparadise.de orkus.net Internet Center http://www.orkus.net WebFreezer.com http://www.webfreezer.com -------------------------------------------------- Please include a copy of the original message in any replies. Incluez une copie de votre courrier original dans chaque réponse svp. Schicken Sie bitte immer eine Kopie der Original-eMail bei jeder Antwort.