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I think a large part of the problem was that standard Pascal wasn't really that great of a language other than for teaching. It only became useful when heavily
by HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
I think a large part of the problem was that standard Pascal wasn't really that great of a language other than for teaching. It only became useful when heavily extended as Turbo Pascal had done. Turbo Pascal was very successful and eventually morphed into Delphi which was also successful.
In the meantime standard K&R C was ubiquitous and anyone taking a CS degree would likely have learnt and used it. C's "close to the metal" approach was a good fit for the under-powered CPUs of the day.
- pjmlp 3y agoNote that most of the early Turbo Pascal features were actually from UCSD Pascal and Apple's Object Pascal, only after Turbo Pascal 5.5, most of the features were from Borland, and then influenced by C++.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoAnd people were seeing C in CS classes because it let you write the OS, which is part of what CS degrees wanted to teach. Pascal didn't really let you do that.
- pjmlp 3y agoISO Pascal not, ISO Extended Pascal, Concurrent Pascal USCD Pascal, Object Pascal certainly did, and several OSes do exist, that were written in them. Ah, but Pascal dialects don't count. In that case same applies to the C dialect, non ISO C compliant, full of compiler extensions as alternative to hand written Assembly, that is allowed in most kernels. However the main point stands, most CS degrees used UNIX alongside the Lion's book, or Minix, thus strenghting C's position on this use case.