On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 12:22 AM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:

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 :-/).

Dave that was exactly my point. Pascal was designed as a teaching language so Wirth did not put things into the language that made it helpful as a production language. So everyone else tried and the language became a mess. Everybody peed on it. Dennis' quote: “When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a worldwide crowd.”

It's not that you could not turn Pascal into a production language, but every attempt to try to do so was done in a different manner. And within firms it was always different. Eight different 'Tek Pascal' implementations -- all close, but different - he says shaking his head.