Niklaus Wirth Birthday Symposium

[Walter Bright]

On 3/14/2014 10:24 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Sadly the world at large ignored what was happening at ETHZ during the mid 90's
> and decided to invest in optimizing C compilers instead.

The shift away from Pascal/Modula2 happened earlier than that. The beginning of 
the end of Pascal was in 1987 - when Zortech C++ was released.

Why do I say that?

Far and away, the most popular platform for programmers was the PC. Before 
ZTC++, C++ was unusable on the PC. ZTC++ caught the OOP wave right on the 
upside, and it was a huge hit on the PC. It was successful enough that Microsoft 
decided they needed to do a C++ too, as well as causing Borland to turn away 
from Borland Pascal towards C++.

(One of the big problems with the Pascal family of languages is the code was not 
portable between platforms, or even between vendors. There was no large library 
of 32 bit code one could port to the PC. There was with C. C and C++ could 
compile and run on 16 bit PCs and 32 bit workstations.)

By the time Modula2 came around, the battle was already lost for the Pascal 
family of languages.

So really, you can arguably assign significant blame on yours truly for the 
failure of Modula2. (At a software trade show in 89 or 90 or so, one of the 
compiler devs for Stepstone M2 ruefully told me that he'd "backed the wrong horse".)

So why did I do a C/C++ compiler initially rather than Pascal/M2? Simple - I'd 
used Pascal in the late 70's, and hated it. I just couldn't get anything done in 
Pascal, it had too many frustrating restrictions, as well as simply looking ugly 
on a page. C and me was love at first sight.