[article] Language Design Deal Breakers

[Peter Williams]

On 26/05/13 21:13, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Am 26.05.2013 09:36, schrieb Walter Bright:
>> On 5/26/2013 12:03 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>>> After being a Turbo Pascal heavy user, C always felt backwards to me
>>> with its
>>> weak types, lack of proper strings, modules and namespaces.
>>
>> I had the opposite experience. Being a Pascal user from the late 70's, I
>> hated Pascal's limitations. A friend loaned me K+R and it was like
>> someone opened a window. I never wrote another line of Pascal; I threw
>> it under the bus, and couldn't work up any interest in TP (which came
>> along later).
>>
>> Proper strings? Those length-prefixed ones that couldn't be longer than
>> 255 characters? Argh. C botched them too with 0 terminated ones, but at
>> least they were usable.
>>
>
> Pascal string limitations were only an issue in classic Pascal, both
> Extend Pascal its sucessors Modula-2 and so on follow a model similar to
> what D offers.
>
> Now it is too late for it, but at the time C could have stayed as
> powerful as it is while offering:
>
> - proper modules, or at least namespaces
>
> - no automatic conversions between arrays and pointers. how hard it is
> to write &a[0]?
>
> - arguments by reference, no need to check for null for every parameter
>
> - strong typed enumerations
>
> - memory allocation without requiring the developer to use sizeof
> everywhere
>
> - strings similar to what D has
>
> - proper arrays, after all the compilers for other languages always
> offered control over when bound checking code was generated
>
> In the end, same syntax, just some semantic improvements on the type
> system.
>
> But now it is too late, we only have modern C++ with its warts, or
> hopefully D, Rust, Go, C#, or something else as possible replacement.
>
> However, given that C and UNIX are one and only, it will outlive us all.

Don't forget that Pascal was only meant to be a teaching language.  That 
it was used for more than that says more about the other languages 
available at the time than it does Pascal.

Peter