From: toby@telegraphics.com.au (Toby Thain)
Subject: [TUHS] Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language - Unearthed!
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2017 12:08:10 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <f4dbb2e0-6cbe-1450-cd25-a54d2ad0e822@telegraphics.com.au> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAEoi9W4JY8vv2Tf1vMoh5paRxOALn7K0jCZHkO3jue2Uk0PDaw@mail.gmail.com>
[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2329 bytes --]
On 2017-09-01 11:57 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 11:59 PM, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au
> <mailto:toby at telegraphics.com.au>> wrote:
>
> On 2017-08-31 10:38 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 3:47 PM, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au <mailto:toby at telegraphics.com.au>
> > <mailto:toby at telegraphics.com.au <mailto:toby at telegraphics.com.au>>> 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.
I think *everything* we do is "in spite of" the language we're using. :)
We will never reach a point where programming language evolution stops,
imho.
--T
>
> (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 prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-09-01 16:08 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 68+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-08-30 12:34 arnold
2017-08-30 14:13 ` Eric Wayte
2017-08-30 14:30 ` Michael Kjörling
2017-08-30 14:43 ` Eric Wayte
2017-08-30 17:10 ` Mutiny
2017-08-30 22:33 ` Michael Parson
2017-08-31 0:55 ` Nemo
2017-08-31 13:29 ` arnold
2017-08-31 18:24 ` Nemo
2017-09-03 0:56 ` Dave Horsfall
2017-09-03 12:07 ` arnold
2017-09-03 22:03 ` Dave Horsfall
2017-09-04 12:12 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2017-08-31 1:13 ` Bakul Shah
2017-08-31 14:48 ` Larry McVoy
2017-08-31 15:26 ` Eric Wayte
2017-08-31 16:12 ` Warner Losh
2017-08-31 17:51 ` Larry McVoy
2017-08-31 18:40 ` Clem Cole
2017-08-31 19:25 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2017-09-01 1:57 ` Nemo
2017-09-01 14:17 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2017-09-01 14:28 ` Arthur Krewat
2017-09-01 14:48 ` William Cheswick
2017-09-01 15:15 ` Clem Cole
2017-09-01 15:47 ` Arthur Krewat
2017-09-01 16:21 ` Nevin Liber
2017-09-01 16:34 ` Dan Cross
2017-09-02 0:24 ` Dave Horsfall
2017-08-31 19:47 ` Toby Thain
2017-08-31 20:37 ` William Cheswick
2017-08-31 20:51 ` Clem Cole
2017-09-01 0:52 ` Bakul Shah
2017-08-31 21:46 ` Larry McVoy
2017-08-31 21:59 ` Arthur Krewat
2017-08-31 22:08 ` Larry McVoy
2017-09-01 1:11 ` Steve Johnson
2017-09-01 0:57 ` David Arnold
2017-09-01 1:22 ` Bakul Shah
2017-09-01 1:26 ` Larry McVoy
2017-09-01 1:51 ` Kurt H Maier
2017-09-01 2:22 ` Bakul Shah
2017-09-01 2:27 ` Larry McVoy
2017-09-01 2:58 ` Bakul Shah
2017-09-01 3:12 ` Dan Cross
2017-09-01 2:51 ` Dan Cross
2017-08-31 20:37 ` Clem Cole
2017-08-31 21:26 ` Toby Thain
2017-09-01 2:38 ` Dan Cross
2017-09-01 3:59 ` Toby Thain
2017-09-01 15:57 ` Dan Cross
2017-09-01 16:08 ` Toby Thain [this message]
2017-09-01 18:15 ` [TUHS] Future Languages (was Pascal not Favorite...) Steve Johnson
2017-09-01 18:43 ` ron minnich
2017-09-01 23:33 ` Chris Torek
2017-09-04 20:55 ` ron minnich
2017-09-01 20:42 ` Clem Cole
2017-09-04 20:44 ` Bakul Shah
2017-09-01 13:46 ` [TUHS] Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language - Unearthed! Clem Cole
2017-09-01 14:43 ` Toby Thain
2017-09-01 15:14 ` Clem Cole
2017-09-01 16:22 ` Dan Cross
2017-09-01 19:07 ` Toby Thain
2017-09-02 13:25 ` Dan Cross
2017-09-02 15:00 ` Toby Thain
2017-09-02 15:16 Diomidis Spinellis
2017-09-02 19:53 ` Toby Thain
2017-09-03 14:48 Norman Wilson
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=f4dbb2e0-6cbe-1450-cd25-a54d2ad0e822@telegraphics.com.au \
--to=toby@telegraphics.com.au \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).