From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: toby@telegraphics.com.au (Toby Thain) Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2017 12:08:10 -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 2017-09-01 11:57 AM, Dan Cross wrote: > 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. 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. >