[TUHS] Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language Unearthed!

Ian Zimmerman itz at very.loosely.org
Fri Sep 1 12:45:48 AEST 2017


On 2017-08-31 17:47, Larry McVoy wrote:

> 	IF (expr)
> 	BEGIN
> 		blah
> 		blah
> 		blah
> 	END
> 
> I'm sorry but I'm with whoever it was that said { } are better than
> BEGIN END.  Seems trivial but it's not to me.

IMO, that's taking 1 part of a large coherent whole and judging by that.
I am terrible with metaphors and similes, but maybe a bit like saying "I
don't like the GPL because it restricts what I can do with my code."

Here's another construct from C:

for (i = n; i > 0; --i) {
    blah();
}

In a language like Pascal (really Algol), that is

FOR i = n TO 0 DO
    Blah()
DONE

That's much closer typing-wise, isn't it?  That's because of the melding
of the brackets with the control structure keywords.  But you can't do
that _and_ have braces.

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