[TUHS] Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language Unearthed!
Bakul Shah
bakul at bitblocks.com
Fri Sep 1 09:36:58 AEST 2017
> On Aug 31, 2017, at 10:49 AM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>
>> If Unix was written in Pascal I would've happily continued using Pascal!
>
> Amusing in the context of Brian's piece, which essentially says if Unix
> could have been written in Pascal, then Pascal wouldn't have been Pascal.
>
> doug\
My point being that perhaps the success of Unix had more to do
with the success of C than anything else. And I believe Unix
success had more to with the set of s/w tools it came with
than C.
For most user programs either language would be been fine.
Given its evoltion C had the necessary features to implement
an OS kernel but I believe Pascal could've been easily (&
minimally) extended to something equivalent. Note that Per
Brinch Hansen & his students did write an OS (Solo) in
Concurrent Pascal[1].
Also note that C itself went through a few iterations while
Pascal was basically the same language that prof. Wirth
defined until 1985.
--bakul
[1] Solo was a university project + it lacked the greatest
strength of Unix (a set of s/w tools). So it stayed a uni
project. Concurrent Pascal was a significant extension over
sequential Pascal but PBH explained his rationale by way of
his excellent book on Operating System Design!
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