Re: [9fans] Re: Plan9 Programming languages ! -- PASCAL?

[forsyth@caldo.demon.co.uk]

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it was intended -- and used -- for more than just teaching, but
unfortunately even the ISO Standard Pascal language does not provide
portable ways of accessing system functions of post-mainframe
operating systems (even interactive i/o might not be provided).
consequently there are a great many dialects and specialised
extensions.  Standard Pascal is a small language that is fairly easy
to implement though.

on the other hand, ISO Extended Pascal still doesn't provide portable
ways of doing many of the things missing from Standard Pascal either,
but it's not small.  It began as a simple and achievable standards
committee project to add 4 or 5 obvious and simple extensions to
Standard Pascal, to address the most common portability problems
(opening an external file named interactively, for instance), but it
took on a life of its own.  (i bequeathed my copy of the resulting huge stack of
paper to the university when i left.)


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To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: Plan9 Programming languages ! -- PASCAL?
Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 16:50:47 -0500
Message-ID: <20011212215052.F2DE7199ED@mail.cse.psu.edu>

> > Why?  What use would it be?
>
> Writting software ! <G> What * use * else...

I've never found Pascal to be particularly useful
for writing software.  I understand that it was
originally intended for teaching purposes, but
there are some tasks which are so difficult to
do correctly with Pascal that you have to learn
how to program again when you start using a
real language, like C.

And then there's Basic...