4 ms·

The whole Wirth family of languages. They had clean, readable syntax, proper modularity, fast compilation, good performance, safety, productivity, GNU compilers

The whole Wirth family of languages. They had clean, readable syntax, proper modularity, fast compilation, good performance, safety, productivity, GNU compilers. But they were shunned because people apparently didn't want to type "begin" and "end" and preferred unintelligible, clever tricks in C.

jstimpfle 9y ago
I'm excited to do some more Pascal in the near future. From what I know about it I can attest to some of your points (fast compilation and performance). However I do consider the syntax one of the main points why I stick with it. It is elegant and extremely efficient, if you know how to use it. It is indeed quite clunky to have to write so many begins and ends (after all, there is typically one of them each 3 lines or so). And you shouldn't use unintelligible, clever tricks in C, at all. They are very easy to avoid (although I agree that even K&R had some of those in it). Related: http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Why_Pascal_is_Not_My_Favorite_Programming_Language http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Why_Pascal_is_Not_My_Favo... http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html
dmitriid 9y ago
Not just syntax. All of Wirth's languages are extremely poor languages with no possibility to grow them. He was stuck in the structural programming world and never ever got out of it. Besides, there's no single ultimate Wirth programming language. All of them are re-hashes of each other with random additions thrown in (Modula, Pascal, Oberon, Active Oberon, Modula 2, you name it). They are small fast programming languages. And that's about it.
- EdwardCoffin 9y ago
  > All of them are re-hashes of each other Or more charitably viewed, successive refinements consisting of collections of proven ideas, with the ideas that didn't pan out in earlier iterations left out, yielding a body of languages that have had wide influence.

jstimpfle 9y ago

I'm excited to do some more Pascal in the near future. From what I know about it I can attest to some of your points (fast compilation and performance). However I do consider the syntax one of the main points why I stick with it. It is elegant and extremely efficient, if you know how to use it. It is indeed quite clunky to have to write so many begins and ends (after all, there is typically one of them each 3 lines or so). And you shouldn't use unintelligible, clever tricks in C, at all. They are very easy to avoid (although I agree that even K&R had some of those in it). Related: http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Why_Pascal_is_Not_My_Favorite_Programming_Language http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Why_Pascal_is_Not_My_Favo... http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html

dmitriid 9y ago

Not just syntax. All of Wirth's languages are extremely poor languages with no possibility to grow them. He was stuck in the structural programming world and never ever got out of it. Besides, there's no single ultimate Wirth programming language. All of them are re-hashes of each other with random additions thrown in (Modula, Pascal, Oberon, Active Oberon, Modula 2, you name it). They are small fast programming languages. And that's about it.

EdwardCoffin 9y ago
> All of them are re-hashes of each other Or more charitably viewed, successive refinements consisting of collections of proven ideas, with the ideas that didn't pan out in earlier iterations left out, yielding a body of languages that have had wide influence.