On Sat, 23 May 2020, Clem Cole wrote:

> [...]  Pascal tries to be the answer, but I think it suffered from the 
> fact that it makes Pascal a production quality language, you had a 
> extend it and everybody's extensions were different.

Perhaps I'm the only one here, but when I was taught Pascal (possibly by 
Dr. Lions himself) it was emphasised to us that it was not a production 
language bur a *teaching* language; you designed your algorithm, debugged 
it with the Pascal compiler, then hand-translated it into your favourite 
language (and debugged it again :-/).

That damned "pre-fill read buffer" was always a swine with interactive 
sessions, though; I recall Andrew Hume threatening to insert a keyboard 
into the terminal's CRT if he saw that "?" prompt on the Cyber...

-- Dave