The fix is correct. I was there at the time, but not directly involved. There was a competition to design a language to replace the large number of languages and variants used by the military. Pascal was in vogue at the time and 3 of the 4 proposals were Pascal derivatives. OO pretty much didn't exist. Simula and Smalltalk were there but nobody in the competition was paying any attention. The requirements documents were a laundry list of things from every language but Cobol, including a number of ideas that had never been implemented in a production language. Rendezvous comes to mind. The compiler for language turned out to be extremely difficult to implement and it took much longer than expected, not a first for the military. The colonel in charge was insistent that there be no subsets. When it finally arrived, the world had passed it by.