26 May
2020
26 May
'20
5:19 p.m.
On 2020-05-26 12:21 AM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Sat, 23 May 2020, Clem Cole wrote:
Prof. Knuth came up with an interesting solution to that -- in the
process, inventing (or maturing) the concept of "literate programming".
Perhaps it's not well known that his most widely used programs (e.g.
TeX) were written in something VERY close to standard Pascal
(preprocessing aside). The translation to C (as required by certain
platforms) was mechanical.
--Toby
[...] Pascal tries to be the answer, but I think
it suffered from the
fact that it makes Pascal a production quality language, you had a
extend it and everybody's extensions were different.
Perhaps I'm the only one here, but when I was taught Pascal (possibly by
Dr. Lions himself) it was emphasised to us that it was not a production
language bur a *teaching* language; you designed your algorithm,
debugged it with the Pascal compiler, then hand-translated it into your
favourite language (and debugged it again :-/).
That damned "pre-fill read buffer" was always a swine with interactive
sessions, though; I recall Andrew Hume threatening to insert a keyboard
into the terminal's CRT if he saw that "?" prompt on the Cyber...
-- Dave