3 ms·
A couple of the things that were interesting about Clascal and its successor Object Pascal: 1. It really didn’t add much to the version of Pascal that Apple wa
by eschaton 8y ago
A couple of the things that were interesting about Clascal and its successor Object Pascal:
1. It really didn’t add much to the version of Pascal that Apple was already using as a systems programming language. That made it easy to teach and learn and easy to add to their toolchain.
2. It used relocatable, handle-based objects rather than pointer-based objects. This was thought to be necessary for the very memory constrained systems of the day, but it had serious performance and stability impact. (You essentially can’t persist a dereference across a sequence point, since it might cause the handle to move.)
- mistrial9 8y ago1. this is banal dismissal.. Object-oriented programming was current research at the time.. and why is "easier to teach" not worth anything at a time when there were precious-few programmers available.. 2. your Serious Performance and Stability problems environment was the home of Microsoft Word 1.0 and Aldus PageMaker, as I recall.. not persisting a handle means that you cant dereference that and then hold only the reference.. in practice, people coming from other code bases wanted to write a thin cover on their own ptr-based mem management.. and that did not work ... native programmers had far less trouble.. and the calls that may move memory were documented, if you looked far enough..