Language progress? [partially OT]

[Russel Winder]

On Sat, 2010-10-23 at 15:23 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
> retard wrote:
> > I can assure you that most commercial / hobbyist users of Pascal haven't 
> > used the original Pascal since Moses was born.
> 
> I tried to use Pascal around 1979-1980. It's probably the most unusable language 
> ever invented. Every commercial implementation of it had to have a boatload of 
> extensions to make it work.
> 
> The problem was, of course, every vendor implemented a different boatload.

Pascal was never really intended as a production language, it was
intended for teaching programming and the abstract concepts behind
programming.  I suggest that in the period 1972-82 it achieved its goals
admirably.  From 1984 onwards it was clearly becoming insufficient for
the task and things moved on.

Most of the commercial Pascal varieties tried to be variants on Modula-2
but labelled themselves Pascal, and here lie the real problems and the
hassles that led to Pascal ending up with a bad name -- one it should
not be landed with in perpituity. 
-- 
Russel.
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Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
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