5 ms·
Pascal was an amazing simplification of ALGOL, but then Wirth went too far, and Modula-2 was worse, not better, as the wild success of Turbo Pascal showed. The
by mikewarot 2y ago
Pascal was an amazing simplification of ALGOL, but then Wirth went too far, and Modula-2 was worse, not better, as the wild success of Turbo Pascal showed.
Then Borland was deranged, and Microsoft was able to tempt Anders Hejlsberg to the dark side. Their derangement resulted in C++, and eventually .NET, a lose-lose-lose situation.
- Jtsummers 2y agoYou mean C#, right? C++ (and MS's adoption of it) predated Hejlsberg's move to MS by quite a bit. He worked first on J++ (for which MS got sued) and then C#.
- fuzztester 2y agoAnd then on TypeScript.
- billforsternz 2y agoC# not C++ I think
- int_19h 2y agoIt's very much arguable whether Pascal was simpler than ALGOL 60 (of which it is a derivative via ALGOL-W), given that it has a much more complicated type system. I mean, A60 didn't even have pointers and records. The only thing I can think of that it did have but Pascal did not is pass-by-name and labels as values. The wild success of Turbo Pascal was due to it adopting many concepts from Modula (units, most notably), and then the decision of Borland to stick with it rather than doing Modula-2 for brand recognition reasons. I can't think of any particular reason why Modula-2 is worse than Pascal, though. It's pretty much Pascal with all the necessary bells and whistles to do proper systems programming like C, and a somewhat shorter syntax (thanks to dropping BEGIN).
- pjmlp 2y agoUnits came from UCSD Pascal.