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Controversy alert: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but as best I remember I always lamented the verbosity of Pascal (I worked professionally for a time i
by FullyFunctional 5y ago
Controversy alert:
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but as best I remember I always lamented the verbosity of Pascal (I worked professionally for a time in Turbo Pascal). Modulo-2 was IMhO a much better language and had he used that, revised with a more concise syntax a-la C/C#/Rust, I think I would have been a lot happier. (I must resist the urge to go back and reimplement BLS Pascal the way I would have liked it).
Stepping back a bit, what really made Anders' early designs remarkable wasn't just the engineering, but the deliberate trade-off he made. He emphasized compilation time over almost everything (I think all contemporaries tried to generate as good code as possible). This priority is what dictated a one-pass compiler and in assembler. I saw the same unusual economy in his code where sometimes he would do things in a less efficient way, presumably because it saved code size.
- flyingchipmann 5y agoI felt like the descriptions of Pascal suits Go well too. Although they are different languages, I felt like their design goals are really similar.
- guenthert 5y agoWell, yes, Modula-2 is the better language, particular for larger and system-level programs, but how is it less verbose?
- FullyFunctional 5y agoIt’s not, I was unclear. I wanted M2/Oberon? with a different, much less verbose syntax. I actually went down the path of changing the Oberon parser to take a different syntax. My PoC worked but I didn’t complete it.