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Interesting choices. They're all very old. I feel we must have learned something since the 1970s that could be used to improve a systems programming language.
by abainbridge 8y ago
Interesting choices. They're all very old. I feel we must have learned something since the 1970s that could be used to improve a systems programming language.
I don't really want to restart a flame war that was extinguished decades ago but Kernighan's critique of Pascal (http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html) is an interesting read today - if only because it reminds me how much simpler things were back then - no mention of memory safety or multi-threading.
I have no knowledge of Object Pascal and Modula-2, so won't comment.
- pjmlp 8y agoKernighan's critique was very biased and he focused on plain ISO Pascal on purpose to get his point across. Cleverly not mentioning that many issues were fixed on ISO Extended Pascal and other dialects. Also that back then outside Bell Labs, most C compilers were actually dialects of the real thing, like Small C and RatC. So it was not like C wasn't without its portability issues outside UNIX. As for memory safety and multi-threading, check Concurrent Pascal and Solo OS from Per Brinch Hansen.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> Cleverly not mentioning that many issues were fixed on ISO Extended Pascal and other dialects. Yes, Kernighan was “clever” in 1981 to ignore ISO Extended Pascal, a standard published in 1991. (I'm also not sure if there was ever more than one implementation of Extended Pascal, though Free Pascal claims it as a planned future feature.)
- pjmlp 8y agoISO Extended Pascal was an update taking into account existing language extensions. Many of them available in 1981 dialects