On Fri, Sep 1, 2017 at 10:43 AM, Toby Thain <toby@telegraphics.com.au> wrote:

I'm not sure if the Apple compiler used circa 1983 was *Object* Pascal
​It wasn't. 
 
but it was certainly extended with many intrinsics, casts, and pointer
operations, bringing it essentially into parity with C for systems and
application programming.
​Which was my point...​ the problem was the every Pascal compiler of the day was different.  strings where the worst.   If you came from the folks that believed strings should carry a length, then you defined them that way, if you believed in a token at the end, you did that.   Moving code was really, really hard...  So know "Pascal" was not good enough -- you had to know N different flavors and since there was no preprocessor, writing code that could be portable between the different flavors was basically not going to happen.

Go back and read BWK document...   for real programming Pascal sucked in practice (theory and practice and all that).  I'm saying that and I loved it (and still do) Pascal as a language.   It's straight forward, safe, clear, easy to read, etc. - but like Brian said, it is not my favorite language.   It is not practical for a great deal of what I do.

To go back to Brian analog, one of my coworkers is a former Air-Force fighter pilot.   She still to fly small plane like Piper Cubs for fun and for small short flights.   She loves them.   She also used to love going at Mach X and dog-fighting and I gather was extremely good at it.  (She was also the first woman to graduate from the Air Force Academy).   Two different tools.

The point is that there is nothing wrong with us having multiple tools to functionally do the same job (programming or flying), nor is there anything wrong with liking one tools better than another (teaching or professionally)
  ​