Language progress? [partially OT]

[Paulo Pinto]

And with it we landed in a world full of buffer overruns and memory errors 
exploits.

Sure Pascal was a bit of a pain sometimes to use, but it did promote safety.

Now we have to fight an uphill battle with C developers to make them realize 
the benefict
of using safer languages while fixing security holes every day.

--
Paulo

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:ia22e1$1upn$1 at digitalmars.com...
> 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.