Historical language survey

[Georg Wrede]

Don Clugston wrote:
> Just Pascal, and I never liked it.

I used to love Pascal. But that probably was because it (Turbo Pascal) 
was the only decent language available on micros before the IBM PC came 
out. Before that I only had used Fortran on large computers and various 
Microsoft Basics, Ron Cain's Tiny C and ASM on micros.

I still have a sweet spot for Borland and their Pascal (later called 
Delphi). But "standard Pascal", as the Wirth-book implementations used 
to call themselves, boy were they a pain to use! No wonder so many 
university students haven't touched anything Pascal like since then.

> <rant> It seemed to go out of its way to make pointers difficult to 
> understand. Plus, the first line of code was the "program" statement, 
> which didn't actually do anything, and the last was an almost invisible 
> fullstop. This was supposed to be a good teaching language? </rant>

I used to wonder about this (redundant) "program" statement, too. Turns 
out it existed only because at the time it was the norm to study, 
comment and discuss the code of a program -- in a context physically 
removed from any data processing equipment.

That is, every piece of code used to get printed on fanfold paper, and 
then jointly reviewed by programmers, who then wrote comments and edits 
in ballpoint on the listing. Hadn't the "program" statement been there, 
then nobody would have known _which_ program they are studying!

The dot at the end was for the same purpose: you could check if this was 
the end, or if you should expect more pages. Broken fanfolds or 
loose-leaf listings simply made this an essential feature.

Contrary to common belief, neither of these were ever there for language 
teaching needs.