Historical language survey

[Sean Kelly]

kris wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> Don Clugston wrote:
>>
>>> Just Pascal, and I never liked it.
>>> <rant> It seemed to go out of its way to make pointers difficult to 
>>> understand. Plus, the first line of code was the "program" statement, 
>>> which didn't actually do anything, and the last was an almost 
>>> invisible fullstop. This was supposed to be a good teaching language? 
>>> </rant>
>>
>>
>> I liked Pascal until I tried to write useful programs in it (this was 
>> with Pascal implemented according to Wirth's book). It seems I spent 
>> all my development time fighting the compiler. The language semantics 
>> locked everything up so tight there was no way to get things done.
>>
>> Then I read K+R, and it was like the light coming on. The language let 
>> me do what I want (casting is the magic ingredient). Despite using 
>> early very buggy C compilers, I spent my time working on my algorithms 
>> rather than fighting the compiler.
>>
>> Pascal vendors noticed the exodus to C, and added a whole boatload of 
>> C-like extensions to Pascal to make it a usable. By then, though, it 
>> was too late to interest me; I never looked at Pascal again. (The 
>> other problem with all those extensions is every vendor did them 
>> differently, making Pascal probably the most non-portable language in 
>> existence because you *had* to use the extensions.)
>>
> 
> Eh? We're talking about the language according the Wirth here (as Walter 
> notes vis-a-vis Wirth's book). Somebody here ought to note that Pascal 
> was designed *solely* as an educational tool, for /teaching structured 
> programming/ ... the syntax and design was never intended as a solution 
> for general-purpose systems programming. It's silly to compare it to C

Yup.  And for that I think it was well-designed.  The syntax is clear 
and free of arcane symbology, and irritating enough to use for real work 
that students are well inclined to move on when they learn a more 
professional language ;-)  The pointer syntax in Pascal drives me 
absolutely insane.

> If you want to talk about languages intended for systems-programming, 
> perhaps you should compare to Modula-2 and Modula-3 instead. Now there's 
> a great language that missed its "market window" and/or opportunity.
> 
> Interesting to note that D is basically a Modula-3 clone, using C-like 
> syntax instead and adding some more op-overloading. Perhaps D could 
> adopt the more advanced 'import' capabilities from Modula-3 also? Back 
> in the dark ages, they understood such things rather well ... the design 
> in Modula-3 allows one to extend original, imported modules without fear 
> of breaking the code that imports them. What a concept <g>

Not to derail the topic, but I'm beginning to feel that the current 
symbol lookup mechanism in conjunction with visibility modifiers does a 
terrible job at separating interface from implementation.  As D is a 
module-based language, I firmly believe that I should not want to adopt 
an C/C++ style include model simply to make my private global symbols 
actually private.  I'd be interesting to see how Modula handled the 
minutiae of importing and symbol lookup.


Sean