Nah, Pascal was a teaching language

Post #287,446 by hnick 6/20/07 5:54:38 PM Reply	Nah, Pascal was a teaching language C was warmed over stylized PDP assembler. It was ported to 8 and 16 bit processors and provided a faster time to proof of concept (although a lot of the initial embedded stuff went to production with C code.) Later, it just got popular. Go figure... C and C++ are ok languages, but they are still just languages. Do it right and it works well. Do it sloppy and it will savage you. Same as human languages... I, personally, never understood the evangelism of certain languages. Some are good for specific things, but generally you can get most languages to do most general tasks. Interpreted languages are not going to work well in drivers, and assembler isn't going to work well in web design (I don't know, maybe it could, but there are better languages available.) Whatever... horses for courses...
Post #287,452 by Andrew Grygus 6/20/07 7:38:43 PM Reply	According to Nicholas Wirth he did not . . . . . write Pascal as just a teaching language. Of course for efficient PC programming it needed some "extensions", which were pretty much finalized in Borland's Turbo Pascal. Personally I've done a lot of passing complex structured variables as pointers, type casting and other behavior considered improper - but not GOTO, no never! Actually, even type casting was included in formal Pascal, but by a means so awkward and obscure as to assure nobody used it. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #287,483 by hnick 6/21/07 7:26:29 AM Reply	So who are you going to believe? Nicholas Wirth or 20 year old Usenet gossip? I mean really... Turbo Pascal was a fun language/package. I seem to recall that it came on a single floppy with room to spare. It could do fun things with VGA colors and curses style windows. It was specified as the required language for a program I had to write for a customer who had to convert the output of some kind of 20 bit processor (probably an in-house bit slice design). TP only had 16 bit signed integers so I ended up converting values by bit shifting 16 bits and multiplying by a real to get a final result. It was interesting but I was hardly impressed with the language. Outside of playing though, that was all I really did with it, so I don't have a real informed opinion. In that time frame, I used mostly PLM and assembler. When I moved into unix systems, C was sort of a natural progression. When I went into OS/2 and Windows world, C/C++ compilers were readily available and I knew the language so I used them. I still like C and C++ for driver work and low level services and such. I don't do much high level web or data base stuff any more. I still maintain that most languages are useful if used properly. I will probably never be able to use english to win this arguement though...
Post #287,492 by CRConrad 6/21/07 9:53:50 AM Reply	Nah, you probably won't: "Argument". HTH! :-)
Post #287,505 by Andrew Grygus 6/21/07 10:59:41 AM Reply	Early versions had only 16-bit integers . . . . . and that was a bit of a problem. Later versions added the 32-bit LONGINT data type which made usability much better. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #287,581 by jb4 6/21/07 11:31:38 PM 6/21/07 11:32:50 PM Reply	Maybe not originally, but when he wrote Modula II ...he wrote it because Pascal wasn't flexible enough as a general purpose language; it was best used as a teaching aid (much like Java is today). jb4 "It's hard for me, you know, living in this beautiful White House, to give you a firsthand assessment." — George W. Bush, when asked if he believed Iraq was in a state of civil war (Newsweek, 26 Feb 07) Edited by jb4 June 21, 2007, 11:32:50 PM EDT Expand All History

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