1 Sep
2017
1 Sep
'17
6:08 p.m.
On 2017-09-01 11:57 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 11:59 PM, Toby Thain
<toby(a)telegraphics.com.au
<mailto:toby@telegraphics.com.au>> wrote:
On 2017-08-31 10:38 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
I think *everything* we do is "in spite of" the language we're using. :)
We will never reach a point where programming language evolution stops,
imho.
--T
On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 3:47 PM, Toby Thain
<toby(a)telegraphics.com.au <mailto:toby@telegraphics.com.au>
<mailto:toby@telegraphics.com.au <mailto:toby@telegraphics.com.au>>>
wrote:
[snip]
My point was that these are very much "real world" programs in a rather
vanilla Pascal.
Well, naturally. My point is to wonder whether that was in spite of the
language. But the problem was that in those days, because
Wirth had designed it
for complete small student programs, it was hard to write large real
programs (as Brian points). So people fixed it and every fixed it
differently. Pascal was hardly standardized. ...
And this was the root of the real problem.
You could not write “real” programs in it and really make them run on
actual systems. Brian was writing that paper, after an exercise in
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).
To be fair, I think that Knuth originally wrote both TeX and METAFONT in
the SAIL language for the PDP-10. He switched to Pascal (again on the
PDP-10) later.
(And if you want to bring SAIL into it as another substrate for "real
world" programs, we might learn something from contrasting it with
Pascal and C. I don't remember anything about it.)
That would be an interesting exercise, albeit a bit far afield from
TUHS, but perhaps the relevance is that one point Pascal and C were
rivals for marketshare (or so it seemed to me early on). Surely, C and
Unix were influenced by other competing technologies of the time.
- Dan C.