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

[Larry McVoy]

+1

On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 09:53:15PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 8:45 PM, Ian Zimmerman <itz at very.loosely.org> wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> >
> 
> Today  I might agree with you because of the fancy IDEs coupled with the
> huge screen size makes this a little easier to read.
> 
> When I learned, screen space was at a premium (24x80) so I had to make
> every line count and pack in as much as I could. And any short cut to
> typing also helped me write things faster, so I gravitated to C as soon as
> it was available at an affordable price... It also was easier to do via
> dialup at 1200 or 2400 baud.
> 
> But then again, I still write in 'C' because I find it easiest to grok
> after 35 years of use... I'm also teaching python to my son and haven't
> introduced C and compilers and makefiles. python just runs and the
> indenting thing, though it offends my aesthetic, isn't a big deal with a
> decent editor.
> 
> Warner

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm