This
paper
(Based on a keynote address presented at the
SIGACT/SIGPLAN
Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, Boston, October 1-3,
1973)
presents the view that a programming language is a tool which should
assist the programmer in the most difficult aspects of his art, namely
program design, documentation, and debugging.
It discusses the objective
criteria for evaluating a language design, and illustrates them by
application to language features of both high level languages and
machine code programming.
It concludes with an annotated reading list,
recommended for all intending language designers.