From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: crossd at gmail.com (Dan Cross) Date: Tue, 26 May 2020 15:55:39 -0400 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] History of popularity of C In-Reply-To: References: <8a2e9b1b-8890-a783-5b53-c8480c070f2e@telegraphics.com.au> <9e5933a166ece32b4fb17c6bbb563873@firemail.de> Message-ID: Cc: to COFF, as this isn't so Unix-y anymore. On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 12:22 PM Christopher Browne wrote: > [snip] > The Modula family seemed like the better direction; those were still > Pascal-ish, but had nice intentional extensions so that they were not > nearly so "impotent." I recall it being quite popular, once upon a time, > to write code in Modula-2, and run it through a translator to mechanically > transform it into a compatible subset of Ada for those that needed DOD > compatibility. The Modula-2 compilers were wildly smaller and faster for > getting the code working, you'd only run the M2A part once in a while > (probably overnight!) > Wirth's languages (and books!!) are quite nice, and it always surprised and kind of saddened me that Oberon didn't catch on more. Of course Pascal was designed specifically for teaching. I learned it in high school (at the time, it was the language used for the US "AP Computer Science" course), but I was coming from C (with a little FORTRAN sprinkled in) and found it generally annoying; I missed Modula-2, but I thought Oberon was really slick. The default interface (which inspired Plan 9's 'acme') had this neat graphical sorting simulation: one could select different algorithms and vertical bars of varying height were sorted into ascending order to form a rough triangle; one could clearly see the inefficiency of e.g. Bubble sort vs Heapsort. I seem to recall there was a way to set up the (ordinarily randomized) initial conditions to trigger worst-case behavior for quick. I have a vague memory of showing it off in my high school CS class. - Dan C. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: