[TUHS] Re: What would early alternatives to C have been?

At 2025-03-09T08:29:43-0400, Clem Cole wrote: I think it's worth noting that, as I undertand it from having read the paper, old Pascal manuals, and ISO 7185 (and, a long time ago, experience with Borland Turbo Pascal), most or all of the defects Kernighan pointed out were addressed by vendored versions of Pascal and ultimately by its ISO standard form. I think even UCSD Pascal had extensions, though I don't recall what they were. My grasp of the chronology is poor, though, and I'd concede that Wirth's Pascal of his 1973 memorandum wears most or all of the mud Kernighan threw at it. For the most part, solving the problems Kerngihan observed did not require doing violence to the language (in other words, they could be solved with extensions rather than by altering the semantics of valid 1973 Pascal syntax). Maybe this is what it means to have been "directed at students"--that easy wins in terms of language improvement were not implemented because covering them topically in a semester-long university course would not have been practical. If so, that may make the tragedy of Pascal greater, not smaller. Though even that doesn't explain why Wirth didn't spec Pascal functions to admit polymorphism (perhaps optionally) in array length. That's an essential property for all sorts of work, even that undertaken by students. (Say you want them to write a function that multiplies matrices. You shouldn't have to specialize the function by matrix dimensions. The obvious pinch point for a Unix programmer is massive inconvenience if you want to handle variable-length strings.) Perusing its manual some months ago, it occurred to me that if someone had had the foresight to implement the language core of Turbo Pascal 7.0, ignoring the libraries/"modules" entirely, and omitting the crap necessary to work with the x86 segmented memory model, I don't think Kernighan would have had much, if anything, to complain about. And, in my opinion, we'd be living in a better timeline. But I guess Pascal just didn't get good enough, soon enough. And I wonder how big such a compiler would be, even if coded competently. Chronology bedevils us in another way. A _lot_ of C language features its advocates are proud of were not present in 1973 or even when Kernighan wrote CSTR #100 around 1980. It is an error to substitute the ANSI C of 1989 for the C that actually existed at the time when asking who'd win in a fight between C and Pascal taking place in, say, 1977. https://gunkies.org/wiki/Typesetter_C Regards, Branden