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

Dan Cross crossd at gmail.com
Sat Sep 2 01:57:54 AEST 2017


On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 11:59 PM, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au>
wrote:

> 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.
>

Well, naturally. My point is to wonder whether that was in spite of the
language.

(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.)


That would be an interesting exercise, albeit a bit far afield from TUHS,
but perhaps the relevance is that one point Pascal and C were rivals for
marketshare (or so it seemed to me early on). Surely, C and Unix were
influenced by other competing technologies of the time.

        - Dan C.
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