3 ms·
Here is Kernighan's take on Pascal from 1981: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pascal.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/read
by Jtsummers 4y ago
Here is Kernighan's take on Pascal from 1981: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pascal.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pas...
It seems pretty representative of other complaints about Pascal (versus C, in particular, but not always) I've seen from that same time.
- pjmlp 4y agoCleverly ignoring that Modula-2, released in 1978, sorts out those issues.
- ncmncm 4y agoModula-2 had already lost that race. It was another extended, incompatible Pascal among myriad others mostly still called Pascal. Scud-pascal, Apollo Pascal, Clascal, Turbo Pascal, what-have-you.
- pjmlp 4y agoYou mean like the myriad of C dialects like K&R C, Small-C, RatC, DBS C, what-havw-you.
- ncmncm 4y agoDifferent compilers, same language.
- pjmlp 4y agoThanks for providing how little you know what they were capable of, versus proper C on UNIX.
- ncmncm 4y agoCode for any that lacked features would still build on a more complete implementation. This is fundamentally different from the Pascal case where extansions absolutely necessary for the compiler to be useful at all differed radically from one to another.
- ncmncm 4y agoKernighan had the experience then of writing "Software Tools in Pascal", updated from "... in RATFOR". RATFOR was a pre-processor for FORTRAN that made it look sort of Pascal-ish. People could use it to code and run unixy utilities on their machines that only had a FORTRAN compiler. Good times! Getting those translated to Pascal was a big enough nuisance to motivate the essay.