Does functional programming work?

[Walter Bright]

retard wrote:
> Fri, 01 Jan 2010 12:19:25 -0800, Walter Bright wrote:
>> When I then picked up K+R C, I never wrote another line of Pascal. It so
>> soured me on Pascal that I never got on the later bandwagons of Modula
>> II, Delphi, TurboPascal, etc. Never even looked at them.
> 
> The programming-language-as-religion problem exists only in your 
> imagination. I fail to see Pascal as a religion. I don't know what the 
> pure Pascal compiler you're talking about is, but ordinary Pascal is just 
> another procedural systems programming language like C. It has a bit 
> different syntax ("begin end" vs "{}" and so on), somewhat different 
> rules for some default data types, but it's more or less C wrapped in a 
> syntactic mask.

Pick up a copy of "Pascal User Manual and Report." That's pure Pascal. 
It's also quite useless. Your program has to be all in one file, for 
instance. For another, writing I/O always appends a newline. Try writing 
binary files with that. There was no way to get at the bit 
representation of a type. Etc.