Wasn't Pascal written as a teaching tool?

Post #101,616 by drewk 5/13/03 8:55:15 AM Reply	Wasn't Pascal written as a teaching tool? I can't remember where I heard that, but I distinctly remember hearing that it was designed to teach programming concepts and it kind of grew into a "real" language. That was the first language I had formal instruction in. The only one if you discount the Fortran class I took and never used anything from. Stuff I've written from scratch still looks a lot like what I wrote for that Pascal class: a short (like 15 lines or less) main program at the top, each line of which calls a function or procedure. I like being able to read the first screen worth of a program and know basically what it does. === Implicitly condoning stupidity since 2001.
Post #101,618 by bluke 5/13/03 9:03:18 AM Reply	Yes see for example [link\|http://www.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis400/pascal/pascal.html\|The Pascal Language Page] "His principle objectives for Pascal were for the language to be efficent to implement and run, allow for the development of well structured and well organized programs, and to serve as a vehicle for the teaching of the important concepts of computer programming " (emphasis added).
Post #101,649 by JimWeirich 5/13/03 11:15:38 AM Reply	Re: Wasn't Pascal written as a teaching tool? drewk [...]a short main program at the top [...] Wait a minute! I thought the main program in standard Pascal was always at the bottom of the listing. -- -- Jim Weirich jweirich@one.net [link\|http://w3.one.net/~jweirich\|http://w3.one.net/~jweirich] --------------------------------------------------------------------- "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)
Post #101,652 by Yendor 5/13/03 11:18:18 AM Reply	Re: Wasn't Pascal written as a teaching tool? Wait a minute! I thought the main program in standard Pascal was always at the bottom of the listing. Depends on the status of your love/hate relationship with forward declarations... -YendorMike [link\|http://www.hope-ride.org/\|http://www.hope-ride.org/]
Post #101,662 by JimWeirich 5/13/03 11:48:48 AM Reply	Forward Declarations Yendor: Depends on the status of your love/hate relationship with forward declarations... Hmmm ... as I recall the structure of a Pascal Program, it looks like this ... \n program Prog\n procedure x\n begin\n end\n procedure y\n begin\n end\n begin\n (* main program goes here *)\n end. The forward declaration could be used to allow procedure x to call procedure y (otherwise mutual recursion is really difficult), but all procedures still have to come before the main (at least in standard Pascal ... I'm sure most people didn't write programs in purely standard Pascal). Then again, maybe my memory is just deficient. (They say memory is the second thing to go ... I forget what the first is). -- -- Jim Weirich jweirich@one.net [link\|http://w3.one.net/~jweirich\|http://w3.one.net/~jweirich] --------------------------------------------------------------------- "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)
Post #101,663 by drewk 5/13/03 11:51:47 AM Reply	Hmm, was Turbo Pascal different about that? === Implicitly condoning stupidity since 2001.
Post #101,671 by Yendor 5/13/03 12:16:32 PM Reply	Been too long Hmmm ... as I recall the structure of a Pascal Program, it looks like this [...] but all procedures still have to come before the main (at least in standard Pascal ... I'm sure most people didn't write programs in purely standard Pascal). I won't claim to remember the required structure of a Pascal program, as it's been about 10 years since I've even seen one. I do remember that I first learned about forward declarations in Pascal. shrug Perhaps the main does need to go at the end. That is where ISTR putting most of my `main()`s, anyway... -YendorMike [link\|http://www.hope-ride.org/\|http://www.hope-ride.org/]
Post #101,850 by jb4 5/14/03 1:35:18 PM 5/14/03 1:38:44 PM Reply	Nope, you're right. Jensen/Wirth Pascal required the "main" at the end, afther the local procedures/functions. J/W Pascal didn't support the concept of an include file either. Turbo pascal took care of those...er, "oversights".... [Edit: clarified what I was referring to] jb4 "We continue to live in a world where all our know-how is locked into binary files in an unknown format. If our documents are our corporate memory, Microsoft still has us all condemned to Alzheimer's." Simon Phipps, SUN Microsystems Edited by jb4 May 14, 2003, 01:38:44 PM EDT Expand All History
Post #101,661 by drewk 5/13/03 11:48:37 AM Reply	Not when I learned it Ot not the way I wrote it anyway. Like I said, I like to open a file, read the top, and know what it does. === Implicitly condoning stupidity since 2001.

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