Niklaus Wirth Birthday Symposium

[Paulo Pinto]

Am 14.03.2014 18:38, schrieb Walter Bright:
> On 3/14/2014 10:24 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> Sadly the world at large ignored what was happening at ETHZ during the
>> mid 90's
>> and decided to invest in optimizing C compilers instead.
>
> The shift away from Pascal/Modula2 happened earlier than that. The
> beginning of the end of Pascal was in 1987 - when Zortech C++ was released.
>
> Why do I say that?
>
> Far and away, the most popular platform for programmers was the PC.
> Before ZTC++, C++ was unusable on the PC. ZTC++ caught the OOP wave
> right on the upside, and it was a huge hit on the PC. It was successful
> enough that Microsoft decided they needed to do a C++ too, as well as
> causing Borland to turn away from Borland Pascal towards C++.
>
> (One of the big problems with the Pascal family of languages is the code
> was not portable between platforms, or even between vendors. There was
> no large library of 32 bit code one could port to the PC. There was with
> C. C and C++ could compile and run on 16 bit PCs and 32 bit workstations.)
>
> By the time Modula2 came around, the battle was already lost for the
> Pascal family of languages.
>
> So really, you can arguably assign significant blame on yours truly for
> the failure of Modula2. (At a software trade show in 89 or 90 or so, one
> of the compiler devs for Stepstone M2 ruefully told me that he'd "backed
> the wrong horse".)
>
> So why did I do a C/C++ compiler initially rather than Pascal/M2? Simple
> - I'd used Pascal in the late 70's, and hated it. I just couldn't get
> anything done in Pascal, it had too many frustrating restrictions, as
> well as simply looking ugly on a page. C and me was love at first sight.

Thanks for the historical info. I love this type of stories.

My main problems with C are the safety defaults, implicit conversions 
and lack of proper modules.

Actually as I mentioned a few times here, I do like C++ and I always 
stand on the C++ side during the usual C vs C++ wars.

It still has those pesky C safety defaults, but offers safe 
alternatives, namespaces and OO/generic programming.

However I do recognise that with the recent trends of (finally) having 
people using static analysers on their code, C can be made a bit safer,
even almost Pascal like.

--
Paulo