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

[Toby Thain]

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

(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.)

--Toby


> 
>         - Dan C.
>