Does functional programming work?

[Mike James]

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.

Borland Pascal, Borland Pascal with Objects and Borland Delphi became the de-facto standard. They dropped the ball and Freepascal/Lazarus picked up the ball. Freepascal now includes templates.

> 
> All this left a huge opening for C, and the rest, as they say, is 
> history. The market window closed for Pascal.