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The Xerox Alto was early 70's and that GUI OS was written in Pascal. I always thought Pascal was better designed and less bizarre than C. Null terminated string

The Xerox Alto was early 70's and that GUI OS was written in Pascal. I always thought Pascal was better designed and less bizarre than C. Null terminated strings were particularly a bad idea.

marcosdumay 3y ago
Oh, by 73. Impressive. I didn't know that. Still, that was a much more powerful machine than the ones people wrote C for. And when the cheap segment of those "fridge computers" became powerful enough to run whatever you wanted to put on it, people started using small workstations. And when those workstations became powerful enough, we got PCs. It's only when the PCs got powerful enough that we could start to ignore the compiler demands and go with whatever language fit us better. (The later reductions all were based on cross-compiling, so they don't matter here.)
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Go check the capabilities of systems written in high level languages like ESPOL and NEWP in 1961. Let not say that a 1961 system is more powerful than a PDP-11.
mcguire 3y ago
"Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language", Brian W. Kernighan, April 2, 1981: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pascal.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pas... One of the major problems, as I recall, was that Wirth's basic Pascal definition was very limited---the max 256 character strings, for example. So the makers of "production" Pascal compilers added extensions to do all of the things that you would want to do and unfortunately those extensions were all incompatible.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  A famous rant ignoring Pascal dialects, while C still lacked a standard and was a bunch of dialects all over the place.
  - mcguire 3y ago
    I've never seen a C dialect, other than not supporting bit fields. The language was usually the same although the libraries were all over the place.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Then you haven't used any C compilers during the CP/M, 8-bit and 16-bit days. Here are two, RatC, Small-C. Additionally what do you think GCC C is, in regards to K&R C and ANSI C?
pjmlp 3y ago
Mesa not Pascal.
- grumpyprole 3y ago
  Yes apologies, I misremembered. Mesa is definitely a decendant of Pascal though, more like Modula-2. Very ahead of its time.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Sorry for being a bit pedantic, it predates Modula-2, Niklaus Wirth got in contact with it during his first sabbatical at Xerox PARC, after returning to ETHZ Modula was born, and shortly thereafter Modula-2 and Lillth Workstation, with the OS written in Modula-2. Several years later, a similar encounter with Mesa's evolution, Mesa/Cedar, gave birth to Oberon. As for being ahead of its time, very much indeed. Many people relate to Smalltalk and Interlisp-D, and are unaware of strong typed systems programming at Xerox, with a tooling that only decades cater came to be. Mesa authors were quite adamant that in order to succeed, Mesa had to support comparable tooling to Smalltalk and Interlisp-D environments.

The Xerox Alto was early 70's and that GUI OS was written in Pascal. I always thought Pascal was better designed and less bizarre than C. Null terminated strings were particularly a bad idea.

marcosdumay 3y ago

Oh, by 73. Impressive. I didn't know that. Still, that was a much more powerful machine than the ones people wrote C for. And when the cheap segment of those "fridge computers" became powerful enough to run whatever you wanted to put on it, people started using small workstations. And when those workstations became powerful enough, we got PCs. It's only when the PCs got powerful enough that we could start to ignore the compiler demands and go with whatever language fit us better. (The later reductions all were based on cross-compiling, so they don't matter here.)

pjmlp 3y ago
Go check the capabilities of systems written in high level languages like ESPOL and NEWP in 1961. Let not say that a 1961 system is more powerful than a PDP-11.

mcguire 3y ago

"Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language", Brian W. Kernighan, April 2, 1981: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pascal.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pas... One of the major problems, as I recall, was that Wirth's basic Pascal definition was very limited---the max 256 character strings, for example. So the makers of "production" Pascal compilers added extensions to do all of the things that you would want to do and unfortunately those extensions were all incompatible.

pjmlp 3y ago
A famous rant ignoring Pascal dialects, while C still lacked a standard and was a bunch of dialects all over the place.
- mcguire 3y ago
  I've never seen a C dialect, other than not supporting bit fields. The language was usually the same although the libraries were all over the place.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Then you haven't used any C compilers during the CP/M, 8-bit and 16-bit days. Here are two, RatC, Small-C. Additionally what do you think GCC C is, in regards to K&R C and ANSI C?

pjmlp 3y ago

Mesa not Pascal.

grumpyprole 3y ago
Yes apologies, I misremembered. Mesa is definitely a decendant of Pascal though, more like Modula-2. Very ahead of its time.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Sorry for being a bit pedantic, it predates Modula-2, Niklaus Wirth got in contact with it during his first sabbatical at Xerox PARC, after returning to ETHZ Modula was born, and shortly thereafter Modula-2 and Lillth Workstation, with the OS written in Modula-2. Several years later, a similar encounter with Mesa's evolution, Mesa/Cedar, gave birth to Oberon. As for being ahead of its time, very much indeed. Many people relate to Smalltalk and Interlisp-D, and are unaware of strong typed systems programming at Xerox, with a tooling that only decades cater came to be. Mesa authors were quite adamant that in order to succeed, Mesa had to support comparable tooling to Smalltalk and Interlisp-D environments.