Does functional programming work?

[grauzone]

Walter Bright wrote:
> grauzone wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> That's all gone in modern Pascal dialects. Delphi is very similar to 
>> D; it's practically a Pascal version of D. The OOP features are the 
>> same, except for some small differences, which make Delphi a bit more 
>> flexible (virtual and named constructors...).
> 
> The problem was, in the 80's, pure Pascal was useless and so needed 
> dialects. Every Pascal vendor added a boatload of extensions, all 
> incompatible with each other. None had enough market share to create a 
> de-facto standard.
> 
> All this left a huge opening for C, and the rest, as they say, is 
> history. The market window closed for Pascal.

Yeah, as it was discussed in this thread. I was just posting this, 
because you tell so often about your bad experiences with Pascal.

I context of retard's posting I also found it funny how the history of 
programming languages seems to repeat itself.