3 ms·
Pascal, at least the original specification, does have a few flaws. It was intended to run as P-code in a VM so you wouldn't expect it to be as good as running
by timbit42 4y ago
Pascal, at least the original specification, does have a few flaws. It was intended to run as P-code in a VM so you wouldn't expect it to be as good as running directly on the hardware.
The successor to Pascal, which fixed it's problems, was Modula-2, which is vastly superior to C. Unfortunately by the time it came out and started becoming available, it was too late for it to compete fairly with C. Ada is comparable to Modula-2, especially before Ada added OOP, but Ada was too late to compete with C as well.
It's taken 30 years but finally we are starting to see safe languages, eg. Rust, compete with C and C++. I don't know whether Rust will be the language that overtakes C and C++, but if not, I believe a successor to it will and C and C++ will become like COBOL, that no ones uses to write any new code.
- Tozen 4y agoPascal was and is continually evolving. A strong argument can be made that Object Pascal was the "successor" of Pascal, and that happened in 1985/86. After Apple and Wirth developed Object Pascal, Borland added the OOP extensions to their version soon afterwards. Turbo Pascal had quite a long run, and some are still using it. The Delphi dialect of Object Pascal came out in the early 1990s and Free Pascal came out in the late 1990s. Many of the so-called issues with Pascal were resolved way back in the mid to late 1980s. In regards to Pascal's competition with C, this arguably evolves around AT&T and Unix. It's AT&T and their huge government, industry, and business influence that pushed C over the top.
- timbit42 4y agoModula-2 has many new features that make it better than Pascal. It is not merely a Pascal with some issues fixed. One small thing I like about Modula-2 is an improvement in the syntax where BEGIN is not required after conditionals and loops.