I first came across exceptions with ADA 83. As far as I know, the designers of ADA invented the concept of exceptions. Is this true, or did any programming language that came before use exceptions too?
There was a lot of good stuff in that language. Pity about how it all worked together.
David Thornley
2009-08-20 19:58:37
Note: this was my answer to the question about what language *exception handling* first appeared in, which was merged with this question, IMO inappropriately.
chaos
2009-08-20 20:20:51
I've changed the question to the one you answered chaos. I tried to just delete it and start again, but even as the question asker, I'm only allowed to vote to delete my own question. This place has changed a lot since I was last here.
David Arno
2009-08-20 20:32:18
A:
From Wikipedia:
Generic programming facilities first appeared in the 1970s in languages like CLU and Ada, and were subsequently adopted by many object-based and object-oriented languages, including BETA, C++, D, Eiffel, Java, and DEC's now defunct Trellis-Owl language. Implementations of generics in languages such as Java and C# are formally based on the notion of parametricity, due to John C. Reynolds.
maxpower47
2009-08-20 19:54:10
If you're going to copy and paste from Wikipedia, at least provide the source link.
Brandon
2009-08-20 19:55:18
I'm confused, even before the edit he put "From wikipedia", what's the problem?
John Rasch
2009-08-20 20:07:17
No, he didn't. He edited it after the fact, it just doesn't show the revision. Either way he did add it very quickly after the fact, so there is no problem.
Brandon
2009-08-20 20:11:18
@John Rasch: He had a stealth edit before the first five minutes where he added the "From Wikipedia".
Jason
2009-08-20 20:12:01
+2
A:
It depends on how you define generics. Parametric polymorphism - which allows you to define functions and types that are not tied to particular argument / field types - was there in ML already - and that's 1973. There is a Standard ML sample from Wikipedia:
fun reverse [] = []
| reverse (x::xs) = (reverse xs) @ [x]
Note that this function is statically typed, but polymorphic ("generic") on any type of list.
While this example is SML (which is a later thing), so far as I know, the concept was present in earliest ML versions as well.
Pavel Minaev
2009-08-20 20:10:39
All folk, please note: this answer was to a related question (in which language did generics first appear) which unfortunately got merged with this one by an over-enthusiastic admin. It's not Pavel's fault it's not an answer to this question, so please do not down-vote him for it.
David Arno
2009-08-20 20:37:16