Re: Or... @John H Woods
The issue with what you said is contained in the term "modern language".
I don't believe that the article said anything about when the error was coded. At one time, C, Pascal, Algol, PL/1, FORTRAN et. al. were all regarded as modern languages, and none of them had a construct to auto sum elements of an array without a loop, but I suspect that you already know something about older languages, as you give a snippet in Smalltalk.
And then, one of the oldest high level languages around, APL, would allow you to sum across a slice of an array in a single operation, to the point where there is not even an explicit loop construct in the language (don't ask me to write the code, it's nearly 40 years since I wrote any APL in anger, and I don't want to work out how to represent the greek characters necessary to represent it here).
Looking at problems with a different perspective often gives different answers.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
