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Actually when Wirth split from the Algol68 working group, he first created his own alternate successor to Algol60 - AlgolW (W=Wirth), which was still in use in
by HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
Actually when Wirth split from the Algol68 working group, he first created his own alternate successor to Algol60 - AlgolW (W=Wirth), which was still in use in 1979 when I took CS in college.
It seems odd for Wirth to be arguing so much for user needs and then come out with a language like Pascal which favored minimalism over practicality.
- lynguist 3y agoIn this talk he seems to have already anticipated the necessarily extensible nature of a simple language, so the language core must be sound such that when new needs arise one extends, which is what did happen.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoWell, Pascal had plenty of flaws too, not just excessive simplicity. From day one the only way to do almost anything non-trivial in Pascal was to abuse variant records as a way to do typecasts. The I/O library was horrible, but standardized as part of the language - e.g. there was no standard way to open a named file, and the only way to close any file was to reopen it (via reset/write) to a temporary file which would have the side effect of closing the original one. In the event there was no standardized (vs proprietary) meaningful improvement to Pascal (ISO Pascal basically just added poorly thought out "conformant arrays"), and Wirth himself just moved on and designed a new language instead - Modula-2, which was an improvement but also not great, then abandoned that in favor of Oberon.