31 Aug
2017
31 Aug
'17
9:47 p.m.
On 2017-08-31 2:40 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
Without reliving the Pascal/C war of the day, I have
to admit that I too
loved Brian’s piece when we wrote it and love it still. But you have
to understand the context.
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).
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?
--Toby
> If Unix was written in Pascal I
would've happily continued using Pascal!
Amusing in the context of Brian's piece,
which essentially says if Unix
could have been written in Pascal, then Pascal wouldn't have been Pascal.
Doug amen.
There really are a few pieces of information that I think are lost from
history. Pascal was and is still as difficult to match as a teaching
language. Brian says exactly that in is piece – it is like a ‘Piper
Cub.’ I /still/ use it for just that when I teach scouts, nieces,
nephews or anyone else that asks me, where to start. Today’s "Free
Pascal" system is pretty hard to beat - runs on anything and "just
works."
When BWK wrote that paper, other than MIT stubbornly hanging on to LISP,
all the major CS departments used Pascal as the language that they
taught freshman CS courses. Cooper and Clancy’s “Oh Pascal” was pretty
much /de rigor/ as the text (I still have a couple of editions from when
I taught with it). I fear that many (?most?) of the traditional
language types hated C as ‘dirty’ if not ‘almost industrial.’ No one
but an “OS-weenie” would use it.
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 exactly that task – rewriting the Software Tools into
Pascal. That
paper was his lessons learned.
BTW: I’ve always thought part of the reason C++ and Java got the jump
they did, was because the language type could say “C didn’t win.” But
I do find it interesting that they now use Python as a teaching
language, which I think is almost ‘dirtier’ than C ever was.
...