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The claim here is that if a language is not hyper-extensible the community will add crufty features to it over time and that is why languages originated by Nikl
by adrianratnapala 10y ago
The claim here is that if a language is not hyper-extensible the community will add crufty features to it over time and that is why languages originated by Niklaus Wirth are getting crufty.
But was Pascal ever more more minimal than C11? Maybe by some metrics, but the difference cannot be big.
Now there is plenty of stupidity in modern C standards, but that is mostly about letting compilers play hell with undefined behaviour in the name of over-aggressive optimisation. It doesn't fit in with the language-bloat thesis of the article.
- 1wd 10y agoHere's one metric: The Pascal 1990 ISO Standard was under 100 pages long. The C90 standard was about 230 pages, and the C11 standard about 700 pages long.
- naasking 10y agoDid the pascal standard include the standard library? Because C does. Doesn't seem like a fair comparison unless both standards specified standard libraries with comparable features.
- TremendousJudge 10y agoI'm pretty sure it included its equivalent functions and definitions http://www.pascal-central.com/docs/iso7185.pdf http://www.pascal-central.com/docs/iso7185.pdf
- adrianratnapala 10y agoI would expect the standards to grow as they take care to nail down more and more corner cases. I don't want to dismiss that: the "stupidity" I mentioned above is largely about making wrong decisions about those corner cases. Indeed, I suspect if the right decisions had been made, the standard could have been shorter. Though perhaps only by a factor two.
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoI would say, yes, Pascal was more minimal, either language to language, or language + library to language + library. Pascal was like programming while wearing a straightjacket; you did things Pascal's way or not at all. C let you do things in a number of different ways.