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Pascal had some annoying implementation features on the Mac: Fixed length string types, for example: Str31, Str255, etc. > So plain C always had very little pl
by doomlaser 8y ago
Pascal had some annoying implementation features on the Mac: Fixed length string types, for example: Str31, Str255, etc.
> So plain C always had very little place at Apple, even at NeXT it was all about Objective-C and Objective-C++, including the driver framework.
That was at NeXT in the late 80s and only came to Apple after Amelio bought NeXT to use NeXTStep as the Classic Mac OS followup.
Apple shipped their first C compiler with MPW 2.0, released on July 20, 1987.
- pjmlp 8y agoJust like C had its quirks, at the time, Small-C was the dialect most of us had access to, outside expensive UNIX systems. Turbo Pascal later fixed those issues, still on MS-DOS. On Apple as they switched focus to C++, they left the Pascal support stagnate.
- willtim 8y agoFixed-length string types are appropriate for a lot of low-level systems programming and are a lot safer and secure than C's null-terminated (potentially unbounded) strings. Null-terminated strings have caused problems not just for security, but have also added significant performance costs: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2010365 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2010365
- doomlaser 8y agoSafer, maybe, but annoying to work with: definitely