1 Sep
2017
1 Sep
'17
5:57 p.m.
On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 11:59 PM, Toby Thain <toby(a)telegraphics.com.au>
wrote:
On 2017-08-31 10:38 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
Well, naturally. My point is to wonder whether that was in spite of the
language.
(And if you want to bring SAIL into it as another substrate for "real
On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 3:47 PM, Toby Thain
<toby(a)telegraphics.com.au
<mailto:toby@telegraphics.com.au>> wrote:
[snip]
> 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.
My point was that these are very much "real world" programs in a rather
vanilla Pascal.
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.