On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 11:59 PM, Toby Thain <toby@telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
On 2017-08-31 10:38 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 3:47 PM, Toby Thain <toby@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.

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
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.