:) Was it Dijkstra that advocated writing everything in assembly, or am I thinking of someone else? I know he was big on formally verifying the correctness of

:) Was it Dijkstra that advocated writing everything in assembly, or am I thinking of someone else? I know he was big on formally verifying the correctness of programs, but I thought I remember him saying that for implementation purposes, he advocated assembly. Or was that more of a "if you can't write it in assembly, you don't understand all the parts" deal? It seems he hated FORTRAN, APL, BASIC, and PL/1, and only later did he like LISP. I wonder what he would have thought of Haskell. Standardization started in the 80's, so he would have been alive when it was being ironed out. A search in the EWD archives didn't reveal anything though. EDIT: http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1213.html http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12x... It appears that he liked functional languages... >The clarity and economy of expression that the language of functional programming permits is often very impressive, and, but for human inertia, functional programming can be expected to have a brilliant future, the more so because today's computers admit quite efficient implementations of functional programming languages. but... >In particular, evaluating a functional program with pen and paper is a pain in the neck! So he spends the rest of the paper talking about the predicate calculus and relation calculus.