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The problem with the true loss of a language (which I would define not only as the death of its active use, but as the loss of documentation of the language's b
by LocalH 7y ago
The problem with the true loss of a language (which I would define not only as the death of its active use, but as the loss of documentation of the language's building blocks) is that you lose access to huge swaths of documented human history.
Few, if any, BASICs are endangered to this level. Nobody outside of enthusiasts may actually be significantly using the language, but it's documented and thus programs written in a BASIC are generally able to be interpreted, and if necessary the logic converted to a different language. Many of these endangered languages are at risk of total loss, akin to if all information regarding a given BASIC syntax were irrevocably removed from all of existence.
- ratmice 7y agoOne instance of this phenomenon is Knuth's TeX program, written in a dialect of Pascal which Knuth calls Pascal-H, accepted by Charles Hedrick's compiler: I believe the sources for the compiler can be found here, https://github.com/PDP-10/rutgers-pascal/ https://github.com/PDP-10/rutgers-pascal/ And at some point Knuth had modified the GNU pascal compiler to compile modified TeX sources. But in practice everyone just translates from Pascal to C, via WEB2C. Programs like XeTeX are even writing new Pascal-H code, which gets translated to C, and seems unlikely to have ever been compiled in the original language.