Re: [TUHS] History of popularity of C

On Tue, 26 May 2020 at 12:01, Thomas Paulsen <thomas.paulsen(a)firemail.de> wrote: I remember the fighting going on at that time. I did some Pascal in about 1986, with one of the Waterloo compilers, and found it mildly a pain in the neck; it was a reasonably-nearly-strict version of the academic language, and was painful for non-academic programming for the reasons normally thrown about. In grad school, I TA'ed a course that was using TurboPascal, and it was definitely a reasonable extension towards usability for larger programs that needed more sophisticated environmental interactions. The compiler was decently fast (unlike Ada, anyone??? ;-) ), and the makers were selective and adequately opinionated as to their extensions. And I fully recall the split ongoing, as academic folk would regard TurboPascal as "non-conformant" with the standard, whilst bwk's missive on "Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Language" provides a good explanation... And bwk nicely observed, "Because the language is so impotent, it must be extended. But each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look like whatever language they really want." The Modula family seemed like the better direction; those were still Pascal-ish, but had nice intentional extensions so that they were not nearly so "impotent." I recall it being quite popular, once upon a time, to write code in Modula-2, and run it through a translator to mechanically transform it into a compatible subset of Ada for those that needed DOD compatibility. The Modula-2 compilers were wildly smaller and faster for getting the code working, you'd only run the M2A part once in a while (probably overnight!) -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"