4 ms·

Gotta love the Str255 used everywhere on Macs before OS X came around. That was how Pascal did things on Macs in the 1980s, and it’s not exactly modern—if you w

Gotta love the Str255 used everywhere on Macs before OS X came around. That was how Pascal did things on Macs in the 1980s, and it’s not exactly modern—if you want something longer than 255 characters, it’s going to be cumbersome. Been digging through old newsgroups, and it sounds like one of the big reasons C won out over Pascal was because it was easier to find good C compilers in the 1980s compared to good Pascal compilers.

KerrAvon 3y ago
Yeah, C compilers were ubiquitous, practically every platform had more than one of them. There were even third-party C compilers for the Mac almost from the beginning. It didn't help that Pascal didn't have a usable standard, which is what led to articles like "Why Pascal is Not Brian Kernighan's favorite language", which also didn't help. Edited to add: there was also some amount of antiestablishment fervor in the microcomputer community, and Pascal was for better or worse perceived as a somewhat ivory-tower language.
- Gibbon1 3y ago
  Pascal on a micro was basically useless unless you were playing with algorithms copied from a book. Because it's a language written by people that only worked on mainframes connected to dumb terminals. Want to write the string 'fat dog' on line 12 column 10? With Pascal you'd have to write a routine in assembly and call it. With C you use a trivial macro. Pascal was also generally very very slow. Almost as slow as basic which had better strings than Pascal.
  - klodolph 3y ago
    “Pascal was slow” is a complaint about the compilers at the time, which is just reiterating my point. Anyway, if you wanted to draw something on the screen, just, MoveTo(10, 12); DrawString('fat dog'); You could do worse.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Even 8 bit Pascal compilers for ZX Spectrum were better than that. Anyway, Pascal was designed for teaching, and Modula-2 was designed for production code and systems programming. UCSD Pascal, and Object Pascal also took many of their ideas from Modula-2.

KerrAvon 3y ago

Yeah, C compilers were ubiquitous, practically every platform had more than one of them. There were even third-party C compilers for the Mac almost from the beginning. It didn't help that Pascal didn't have a usable standard, which is what led to articles like "Why Pascal is Not Brian Kernighan's favorite language", which also didn't help. Edited to add: there was also some amount of antiestablishment fervor in the microcomputer community, and Pascal was for better or worse perceived as a somewhat ivory-tower language.

Gibbon1 3y ago
Pascal on a micro was basically useless unless you were playing with algorithms copied from a book. Because it's a language written by people that only worked on mainframes connected to dumb terminals. Want to write the string 'fat dog' on line 12 column 10? With Pascal you'd have to write a routine in assembly and call it. With C you use a trivial macro. Pascal was also generally very very slow. Almost as slow as basic which had better strings than Pascal.
- klodolph 3y ago
  “Pascal was slow” is a complaint about the compilers at the time, which is just reiterating my point. Anyway, if you wanted to draw something on the screen, just, MoveTo(10, 12); DrawString('fat dog'); You could do worse.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Even 8 bit Pascal compilers for ZX Spectrum were better than that. Anyway, Pascal was designed for teaching, and Modula-2 was designed for production code and systems programming. UCSD Pascal, and Object Pascal also took many of their ideas from Modula-2.