From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: Plan9 Programming languages ! -- PASCAL? From: "rob pike" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <20011213042544.1699619A00@mail.cse.psu.edu> Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2001 23:25:41 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 34952aac-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 When I worked in Switzerland I used Pascal on the 7600 at ETH, Klaus's very compiler on Klaus's very machine. It was a fascinating exercise because I learned a great deal about why Pascal, particularly Pascal I/O, is so bizarre. It has to with generalities and even I think a few local specifics of the operating system Control Data installed on this particular machine. When the input is a card deck and you can always see if the next card is $EOF$ (or something like that), the handling of EOF on a terminal is far from your mind and Pascal's nextln and all that almost seems OK. In that weird world, Pascal I/O made sense to me, but in no other. -rob