From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: clemc@ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2017 16:51:05 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language - Unearthed! In-Reply-To: References: <201708301234.v7UCYsPQ002608@freefriends.org> <20170831011339.9465B124AEA5@mail.bitblocks.com> <20170831144852.GK11202@mcvoy.com> <20170831175120.GM11202@mcvoy.com> <58653222-af68-ba25-bc87-3dc9f36b6c7a@telegraphics.com.au> Message-ID: On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 4:37 PM, William Cheswick wrote: > I wrote a plotter driver for the CDC in Pascal. Brian’s comments were > apt: drivers aren’t quite the same as a filter, even a Knuthian-style > program. > > I thought the world would end up using some post-Pascal, strongly typed > language. Maybe Oberon or Modula would fix things. (I don’t think any of > a decade’s worth of Pascal programs I wrote ever had a buffer overflow > vulnerability.) > ​ditto, Pascal and Mod-II and Mod-III were pretty slick. They were a little wordy compared to C, but I admit the programs we wrote in them "just worked" and I can not think any security issues in any that we wrote. > > I look to the likes of go and rust to get us back on track. C is a pretty > good assembly language. > ​+1 But Ches, that leaves the open question of what to teach? My daughter loves it and that's what college taught her, but I cringe when I look at what she and her peeps do with Python. To me that's more like shell scripting. Maybe its my inner curmudgeon showing. I have not seen anything like Clancy's "Oh Pascal" book in the key of Go, much less Brinch Hansen's "Java for Everyone" ​which I still think are two of the best teaching text out there. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: