I wrote a plotter driver for the CDC in Pascal.  Brian’s comments were apt: drivers aren’t quite the same as a filter, even a Knuthian-style program.

I thought the world would end up using some post-Pascal, strongly typed language.  Maybe Oberon or Modula would fix things.  (I don’t think any of a decade’s worth of Pascal programs I wrote ever had a buffer overflow vulnerability.)

I look to the likes of go and rust to get us back on track.  C is a pretty good assembly language.

On 31Aug 2017, at 3:47 PM, Toby Thain <toby@telegraphics.com.au> wrote:


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