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> It's very simple: Simplicity. Well, simplicity in a programming language is IMO only a virtue as long as it doesn't come at the cost of too much functionalit

> It's very simple: Simplicity. Well, simplicity in a programming language is IMO only a virtue as long as it doesn't come at the cost of too much functionality, which with Pascal it surely did. There's a reason that of C and Pascal, C is the one that survived. It's the simplicity of Pascal that ultimately killed it, since it forced any practical implementation to heavily extend the language (Turbo Pascal, Apple's Clascal, etc). Even USCD's famous P-System extended as much as it subsetted the language. What this meant is there was in practice no Pascal standard, only these isolated ecosystems which eventually died one at a time. In contrast to Pascal, C (which was designed only a couple of years later) was functionally complete enough, even in original K&R form, that it was implemented as a standard, and the standard endured past the lifetime of any individual implementation. The simplicity of Pascal also came at extreme cost in terms of performance and usability. For example most non-trivial Pascal programs (certainly any use for systems programming) end up using the "variant record hack" for type casts (e.g. pointer to int). So, rather than not allow type casts, Pascal allowed it but made it have a runtime cost of load/store rather than being free. Or another example - Pascal only supported value or var (passed by reference) function parameters, so if you want to efficiently pass a record or array type you'd have to pass it as "var" to avoid being copied, even if the caller wasn't meant to modify it. Hmm.. or how about Pascal's "simple" for loops, which took the form "for i := x to y", which means you couldn't use it for "i = 0 to (N-1)" without the cost of calculating "N-1" and would have to use a while or repeat loop for that instead at the cost of readability/maintainability. Or how about Pascal's (variable sized) "conformant array" function parameters which the language didn't allow you to pass to another function... Or how about the fact that Pascal didn't support length-1 strings (length 0 and 2+ ok, though), since it made things "simple" by regarding 'a' as a char vs 'ab' as a string (incompatible types). Yes, it was simple, but very poorly thought out, and practically useless unless extended.

vidarh 4y ago
Nobody, including Wirth, wanted Pascal in its original form to survive, or at least to be in widespread use, given he iterated on it multiple times. You'll note the article is not about Pascal. For a reason. Pascal is a very different beast to the Oberon family, which proved itself - in it's unexpanded form - viable to implement both a OS and applications, whether or not you like the tradeoffs of the languages. Focusing on Pascal is also irrelevant to the point I made, which was to answer the general point of the appeal of Wirth's languages.
- HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
  But even with Oberon, Wirth doesn't seem to have learnt the usability lesson, and removed stuff like enumeration types and variant records. I get the appeal of a simple language, but was just pointing out that in addition to compromising functionality it also lead to the death of Wirth's languages by means of there effectively being no standard. I've probably had as much exposure to Wirth's languages as anyone: - Learnt Algol-W in college c. 1979 - Implemented ISO-Pascal (me +1) at Acorn (UK) c.1982 - Used Modula-2 to program parts of PANOS at Acorn Have spent the last few months programming in Acorn ISO Pascal on an 8-bit emulator (BeebEm), struck by how awful the language itself really was!
  - vidarh 4y ago
    You appear to want him to have different goals for these languages than he had. That they don't have mass adoption is fine. It's not their primary value. That said, "death" is too harsh, all the time there are multiple implementations of both Wirth-derived (the most prominent being Delphi, which is still being developed and sold) and "pure" Wirth languages available and in use. If anything, I find it more remarkable that they've been seen as much adoption as they have outside of teaching. There's even a very expensive commercial ARM implementation of Oberon-07. It's in any case largely irrelevant to the question of their appeal. I don't want to work in Oberon (or Pascal) any more than you do (but, to tie it back to this article, I also don't want to work in C++ unless I have to), but in terms of distilling lessons of what is needed from a language, and a learning tool, it is up there with Smalltalk and Lisp (other languages I don't want to work in) as one of a small handful of the language designs that will continue to influence for a long time to come. And that is a large part of their appeal - not for day to day use, but for the lessons you can learn from them. I don't care if nobody uses them. I care about the research they contributed to and spawned, and what I can still learn from them. > and removed stuff like enumeration types and variant records. Oberon replaced variant records with extended types, type tests, and procedure variable (function pointers), sufficient to do OOP. In terms of his goal of focusing on sticking to the bare essentials, it was a good tradeoff, and it sparked novel work.
    - 4y ago

vidarh 4y ago

Nobody, including Wirth, wanted Pascal in its original form to survive, or at least to be in widespread use, given he iterated on it multiple times. You'll note the article is not about Pascal. For a reason. Pascal is a very different beast to the Oberon family, which proved itself - in it's unexpanded form - viable to implement both a OS and applications, whether or not you like the tradeoffs of the languages. Focusing on Pascal is also irrelevant to the point I made, which was to answer the general point of the appeal of Wirth's languages.

HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
But even with Oberon, Wirth doesn't seem to have learnt the usability lesson, and removed stuff like enumeration types and variant records. I get the appeal of a simple language, but was just pointing out that in addition to compromising functionality it also lead to the death of Wirth's languages by means of there effectively being no standard. I've probably had as much exposure to Wirth's languages as anyone: - Learnt Algol-W in college c. 1979 - Implemented ISO-Pascal (me +1) at Acorn (UK) c.1982 - Used Modula-2 to program parts of PANOS at Acorn Have spent the last few months programming in Acorn ISO Pascal on an 8-bit emulator (BeebEm), struck by how awful the language itself really was!
- vidarh 4y ago
  You appear to want him to have different goals for these languages than he had. That they don't have mass adoption is fine. It's not their primary value. That said, "death" is too harsh, all the time there are multiple implementations of both Wirth-derived (the most prominent being Delphi, which is still being developed and sold) and "pure" Wirth languages available and in use. If anything, I find it more remarkable that they've been seen as much adoption as they have outside of teaching. There's even a very expensive commercial ARM implementation of Oberon-07. It's in any case largely irrelevant to the question of their appeal. I don't want to work in Oberon (or Pascal) any more than you do (but, to tie it back to this article, I also don't want to work in C++ unless I have to), but in terms of distilling lessons of what is needed from a language, and a learning tool, it is up there with Smalltalk and Lisp (other languages I don't want to work in) as one of a small handful of the language designs that will continue to influence for a long time to come. And that is a large part of their appeal - not for day to day use, but for the lessons you can learn from them. I don't care if nobody uses them. I care about the research they contributed to and spawned, and what I can still learn from them. > and removed stuff like enumeration types and variant records. Oberon replaced variant records with extended types, type tests, and procedure variable (function pointers), sufficient to do OOP. In terms of his goal of focusing on sticking to the bare essentials, it was a good tradeoff, and it sparked novel work.
  - 4y ago