I did a lot of Pascal programming back in the day on my DEC Rainbow with Turbo Pascal. Also wrote a compiler for an 'extended subset' of the language in my CS compiler's class, which was fun. But by then I'd transitioned to C (once Turbo C was available for the IBM-PC, I hacked together a TSR so I could run it on the not-too-compatible Rainbow). I liked the low level access, but honestly, when I was a kid programming, I liked that { was 4 characters shorter than BEGIN and } was 2 shorter than END more than anything else... Also, the generally mono-case of C (at the time, this was before I discovered X11's bletcherous CamelCaseStyle) was easier on the eyes.... But these days I'm more mellow about this stuff since I know that the time to type in the code is tiny compared to the time spent chasing down a bug because ++*++foo--; didn't work like you'd expected making all the cleverness that went into it wasted...

Warner

On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 9:26 AM, Eric Wayte <ewayte@gmail.com> wrote:

In the mid 80's when I took Programming II as part of my CS degree, I used every Pascal compiler I could get my hands on: Waterloo Pascal on VM/CMS (mainframe), Turbo Pascal, UCSC p-System on an Apple II, and Kyan Pascal on my Atari 800XL.

Fun times!

On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 10:48 AM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
I did a lot of programming in Turbo Pascal (because it was so fast
to compile) and I liked the language OK.

I was taught data structures in Pascal and later taught using Pascal
and it was a fine teaching language. I agree with the comment that
it is easier to use right, more guard rails.

But as you grow up, you want to take off the guard rails once in a
while and Pascal didn't let you do that. C does that routinely,
which one could argue isn't that great, but it sure is handy.

On Wed, Aug 30, 2017 at 06:13:39PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Aug 2017 06:34:54 MDT arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > Brian Kernighan was kind enough to find for me everyone's favorite
> > Computing Sceince Technical Report, CSTR 100, "Why Pascal is Not
> > My Favorite Programming Language".
>
> If I may comment on the paper itself....
>
> I used Pascal heavily for about 5-6 years and was also
> involved in implementing a variant of Pascal for a couple of
> years. And I have used C since 1981. I have to say I was
> quite happy using Pascal. Some of bwk's criticism (e.g. re:
> sets) applies to pascal compilers, not the language. There is
> also some misunderstanding (e.g.
> type apple = integer; orange = integer;
> This is renaming, not a new type). The array problem got
> fixed somewhat in the 1985 standard, while arrays are not
> even first class objects in C. Most implementations added
> separate compilation as well (1985 standard considers this an
> implementation issue but does allow you to declare external
> references).
>
> Things I missed in C that were in Pascal:
> - enumerated types (type color = (red, blue, green))
> - subranges
> - nested functions (even if limited)
> - first class arrays (even if limited)
> - sets
> - lexical non-local goto
> - bounds checking
> - arrays that didn't start at 0.
> - function argument checking (K&R C)
> - tagged variant records
>
> All in all, both languages are quite comparable. Each
> language had their strong points and weak ones. Basically Pascal
> was easier to use /right/ and C more flexible. Pascal code is
> easier to read than C code (even today). It was harder to
> "cheat" in Pascal but the same is a useful feature of C for
> low level work. To be frank the *main* thing that attracted
> me to C was its conciseness :-) If Unix was written in Pascal
> I would've happily continued using Pascal!
>
> --bakul

--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm

--
Eric Wayte