31 Aug
2017
31 Aug
'17
11:26 p.m.
On 2017-08-31 4:37 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 3:47 PM, Toby Thain <toby(a)telegraphics.com.au
<mailto:toby@telegraphics.com.au>> wrote:
Professor Knuth seemed to manage OK, writing TeX and METAFONT in Pascal
(using his literate programming toolset, but that did not extend the
language much).
Indeed - problem was it was in a PDP-10/20 /flavor/ and would compile
on a Vax, without /much/ hacking - I know I moved it once. It was a
real PITA. Eventually folks would migrate to C implementations.
Those were mechanical translations from the Pascal. You're right though,
that this could improve things when the C compilers were better than the
Pascal compilers or where only a C compiler was available.
(I ported TeX in this way a couple of times and did a lot of hacking on
a Pascal-to-C translator.)
--T
I suppose Apple's Pascal and Object Pascal -- used for Lisa and
Macintosh applications and systems software -- comes under the "so
people fixed it" category?
That was the issue, everyone 'fixed it' and the fixes were all all
different. Eventually market place pressure of the PC made Turbo
Pascal enough of a standard because so many people were using it, but by
that time, the war had been lost.
All the things Brian points out that made C great, made it the language
commercial folks used for both the PC and UNIX.