DerSaidin

> It's about being able to implement your ideas.

This is where the choice of language might help or hinder you. One language might take longer to implement it or be more prone to bugs.

The question of whether or not your ideas turn out to be fun is completely orthogonal.

I'd like for boarding passes to fit in my passport without folding them or hanging out.

For a human reading LLVM IR, it hasn't changed much between versions since at least 2.6.

What is the distinction between Nested records and Parallel arrays?

Nested records support an "array of a specific number of data objects of the same type stored one after the other". That is what is needed for parallel arrays. The parallel arrays examples just happen to have more numerical types.

The distinguishing features listed seem to mostly be about the implementation supporting fast numerical computation better ("used binary instead of decimal", "supported floating-point math"). These might distinguish the languages Fortran and Cobol, but I think this is orthogonal to the memory model.

Is it because Nested records in Cobol does not have dynamic memory allocation and pointers? What if an object graph was statically allocated - is allocation also orthogonal?

Is the distinction having a storage layout which is row-oriented vs column-oriented?