DMD 0.148 release

[Roberto Mariottini]

In article <du19j7$15r9$2 at digitaldaemon.com>, Walter Bright says...
>
>
>Pascal didn't have implicit type conversions. That meant that typical Pascal 
>code was littered with casts. It was ugly, and I'd argue that casting 
>reduces type safety, rather than enhancing it.

This is untrue. Pascal is a strong-typed language for application programming,
so you won't need a single cast (something in Pascal doesn't exist).
Pascal was not born for system programming, for this at the time people used
assembly (O.S. themselves were writeen in assembly).

>Pascal played catchup ever since, adopting features of C. Then Pascal++ 
>(i.e. Modula 2) came out, which was promptly buried by C++. 

This is pathethic.

When ISO Pascal standard was issued, there wasn't an ISO C.
The first ANSI C is from 1989, six years after the Pascal standard.
And ANSI-C was a very different language from pre-ANSI-C, for example
introducing function prototypes, and changing the function argument passing
behaviour, among the other things. So it' *C that has adopted features of
Pascal* not the reverse.

It's funny that you say that Modula-2 took something from C++, that is not the
case.
D took modules from Modula-2, instead, and better than the loosy C++ namespace
thing.

Ciao

P.S.: A little time table:

1970 The first Pascal compiler is released
1973 The first Unix kernel is written in C (with the first C compiler available)
1974 The book "PASCAL - User Manual and Report" is published
1978 The book "The C Programming Language" by K&R is published
1980 The first Modula-2 compiler is released
1982 The book "Programming in Modula-2" is published
1983 The ISO Pascal standard is approved
1985 The first edition of "The C++ Programming Language" and the first C++
compiler are released
1989 The ANSI/ISO C standard is approved
1996 The ISO Modula-2 standard is approved
1998 The ISO C++ standard is approved

As you can see the first Pascal compiler predates the first C compiler, the
first Modula-2 compiler predates the first C++ compiler, Pascal predates C and
Modula-2 predates C++.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_programming_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-2
http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~wirth/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_language
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B