According to Nicholas Wirth he did not . . .

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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