From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: crossd@gmail.com (Dan Cross) Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2017 11:57:54 -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 11:59 PM, Toby Thain wrote: > On 2017-08-31 10:38 PM, Dan Cross wrote: > > On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 3:47 PM, Toby Thain > > wrote: > > [snip] > > > > > But the problem was that in those days, because Wirth had designed > it > > > for complete small student programs, it was hard to write large > real > > > programs (as Brian points). So people fixed it and every fixed it > > > differently. Pascal was hardly standardized. ... > > > > > > And this was the root of the real problem. > > > > > > You could not write “real” programs in it and really make them run > on > > > actual systems. Brian was writing that paper, after an exercise > in > > > > Professor Knuth seemed to manage OK, writing TeX and METAFONT in > Pascal > > (using his literate programming toolset, but that did not extend the > > language much). > > > > To be fair, I think that Knuth originally wrote both TeX and METAFONT in > > the SAIL language for the PDP-10. He switched to Pascal (again on the > > PDP-10) later. > > My point was that these are very much "real world" programs in a rather > vanilla Pascal. > Well, naturally. My point is to wonder whether that was in spite of the language. (And if you want to bring SAIL into it as another substrate for "real > world" programs, we might learn something from contrasting it with > Pascal and C. I don't remember anything about it.) That would be an interesting exercise, albeit a bit far afield from TUHS, but perhaps the relevance is that one point Pascal and C were rivals for marketshare (or so it seemed to me early on). Surely, C and Unix were influenced by other competing technologies of the time. - Dan C. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: