Does functional programming work?

[Walter Bright]

grauzone wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> retard wrote:
>>> Fri, 01 Jan 2010 12:19:25 -0800, Walter Bright wrote:
>>>> When I then picked up K+R C, I never wrote another line of Pascal. 
>>>> It so
>>>> soured me on Pascal that I never got on the later bandwagons of Modula
>>>> II, Delphi, TurboPascal, etc. Never even looked at them.
>>>
>>> The programming-language-as-religion problem exists only in your 
>>> imagination. I fail to see Pascal as a religion. I don't know what 
>>> the pure Pascal compiler you're talking about is, but ordinary Pascal 
>>> is just another procedural systems programming language like C. It 
>>> has a bit different syntax ("begin end" vs "{}" and so on), somewhat 
>>> different rules for some default data types, but it's more or less C 
>>> wrapped in a syntactic mask.
>>
>> Pick up a copy of "Pascal User Manual and Report." That's pure Pascal. 
>> It's also quite useless. Your program has to be all in one file, for 
>> instance. For another, writing I/O always appends a newline. Try 
>> writing binary files with that. There was no way to get at the bit 
>> representation of a type. Etc.
> 
> That's all gone in modern Pascal dialects. Delphi is very similar to D; 
> it's practically a Pascal version of D. The OOP features are the same, 
> except for some small differences, which make Delphi a bit more flexible 
> (virtual and named constructors...).

The problem was, in the 80's, pure Pascal was useless and so needed 
dialects. Every Pascal vendor added a boatload of extensions, all 
incompatible with each other. None had enough market share to create a 
de-facto standard.

All this left a huge opening for C, and the rest, as they say, is 
history. The market window closed for Pascal.