Historical language survey

[Walter Bright]

kris wrote:
> Eh? We're talking about the language according the Wirth here (as Walter 
> notes vis-a-vis Wirth's book). Somebody here ought to note that Pascal 
> was designed *solely* as an educational tool, for /teaching structured 
> programming/ ... the syntax and design was never intended as a solution 
> for general-purpose systems programming. It's silly to compare it to C

Intended or not, the pascal compiler vendors of the time certainly 
positioned it as a general purpose programming language, and often it 
was the only choice on a platform other than Fortran, Basic, or assembler.


> Interesting to note that D is basically a Modula-3 clone, using C-like 
> syntax instead and adding some more op-overloading. Perhaps D could 
> adopt the more advanced 'import' capabilities from Modula-3 also? Back 
> in the dark ages, they understood such things rather well ... the design 
> in Modula-3 allows one to extend original, imported modules without fear 
> of breaking the code that imports them. What a concept <g>
> 
> In fact, here's an NG post from almost 5 years ago: 
> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/94.html

And I still don't know anything about M3 <g>. But being able to extend 
imports without breaking users can easily be done with some variation on 
the PIMPL technique or interfaces.