Language progress? [partially OT]

[Walter Bright]

Russel Winder wrote:
> 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. 

I think Pascal did a good job of promoting "structured programming", the 
buzzword of the 70's.

"User Friendly" was the buzzword of the 80s.

"Object Oriented" for the 90s.

"Generic" for the 00s.

"Functional" for the teens, I suppose. Too soon to tell.

I'm less forgiving of Pascal than you are. I have the original PUM&R, and yes, 
it was designed as a teaching language. But still, a teaching language shouldn't 
be so awfully crippled and with such huge mistakes (array handling).

Modula-2 failed because by the time it appeared, everyone fed up with Pascal's 
failings had moved to C (and then C++). I remember a Modula-2 vendor telling me 
in the late 80's that they'd screwed up and backed the wrong horse, they should 
have gone with C++.

Modula-2 also screwed up by not calling itself Pascal-2.

I used OMSI Pascal in 1978 or so, I don't think it was related to Modula-2. 
Naturally, it had extensions, too. Pascal is unusable without extensions, even 
for simple programs.

Pascal annoyed me so much, and C was *so* much better, I never gave M2 a serious 
look. Consider this: C today is still a dominant language, and is largely 
unchanged from the early 80's. But Pascal evolved into Modula, Modula 2, Oberon, 
Delphi, Object Pascal, etc., always trying to find a workable combination of 
features. Meanwhile, the world passed it by.