4 ms·

And we lost Wirth this year sadly. I hope we can find a language with safety, simplicity, and just enough features to be practical someday.

musicale 2y ago
I think Wirth said something like "I am a programmer who is a professor, and a professor who is a programmer." Definitely a huge inspiration to me, both for the elegance and compactness of his system designs as well as the idea that research could and should affect practice, and vice-versa. At least with -fbounds-safety clang is finally catching up with what Pascal (including UCSD, Apple, and Turbo Pascal) and Ada (a rather more complicated descendant of Pascal) compilers had in the 1980s. (Delphi and Free Pascal still have range checking today.)
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
  But you could insert ASM instructions directly into PASCAL code, in case you needed something fast and without bounds checking.
  - Pet_Ant 2y ago
    I think was added in Turbo Pascal, not in the versions he wrote. I could be mistaken.
    - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
      It worked in pdp-11 version of pascal, long before turbo pascal.
pjmlp 2y ago
I found that in Modula-2 and Oberon, however times have changed. For me the best version of Oberon linage is Active Oberon, while I appreciate Wirth I think he went too far on his quest for language simplification. Even Go has more features than Oberon -07. As for Modula-2, it is now a standard language on GCC, otherwise Zig and Odin are relatively similar for the curly bracket folks.
- tengwar2 2y ago
  I found Modula-2 to be annoying to use, not for any deep reason, but because of its use of block capitals for keywords, and a confusing nomenclature for casting. It does actually matter that a language is comfortable to write.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Keywords were never an issue to me, because I love tools, and most proper Modula-2 IDEs supported automatic formatting, just like I write SQL in lower case and let my tools work for me. People should stop designing languages for notepad and classical UNIX V6 vi as editor experience. Casts well, each language has its own nomenclature for type conversions.
    - tengwar2 2y ago
      That is true now, but remember how far back this was. I was programming Modula-2 on CP/M - our lab standardised on the Amstrad 8512 for control / data acquisition for cost reasons. Early PCs existed, running MS/DOS, so you could probably get Micro-Emacs - I don't remember when that came out. I remember seeing one Sun 3, but they were not common equipment. This was at Oxford. So in brief, it didn't work well with the operating systems of the period. Can you fix that problem now? Yes, but the window for Modula-2 closed decades back. It doesn't have any significant selling points now.

musicale 2y ago

I think Wirth said something like "I am a programmer who is a professor, and a professor who is a programmer." Definitely a huge inspiration to me, both for the elegance and compactness of his system designs as well as the idea that research could and should affect practice, and vice-versa. At least with -fbounds-safety clang is finally catching up with what Pascal (including UCSD, Apple, and Turbo Pascal) and Ada (a rather more complicated descendant of Pascal) compilers had in the 1980s. (Delphi and Free Pascal still have range checking today.)

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
But you could insert ASM instructions directly into PASCAL code, in case you needed something fast and without bounds checking.
- Pet_Ant 2y ago
  I think was added in Turbo Pascal, not in the versions he wrote. I could be mistaken.
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
    It worked in pdp-11 version of pascal, long before turbo pascal.

pjmlp 2y ago

I found that in Modula-2 and Oberon, however times have changed. For me the best version of Oberon linage is Active Oberon, while I appreciate Wirth I think he went too far on his quest for language simplification. Even Go has more features than Oberon -07. As for Modula-2, it is now a standard language on GCC, otherwise Zig and Odin are relatively similar for the curly bracket folks.

tengwar2 2y ago
I found Modula-2 to be annoying to use, not for any deep reason, but because of its use of block capitals for keywords, and a confusing nomenclature for casting. It does actually matter that a language is comfortable to write.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Keywords were never an issue to me, because I love tools, and most proper Modula-2 IDEs supported automatic formatting, just like I write SQL in lower case and let my tools work for me. People should stop designing languages for notepad and classical UNIX V6 vi as editor experience. Casts well, each language has its own nomenclature for type conversions.
  - tengwar2 2y ago
    That is true now, but remember how far back this was. I was programming Modula-2 on CP/M - our lab standardised on the Amstrad 8512 for control / data acquisition for cost reasons. Early PCs existed, running MS/DOS, so you could probably get Micro-Emacs - I don't remember when that came out. I remember seeing one Sun 3, but they were not common equipment. This was at Oxford. So in brief, it didn't work well with the operating systems of the period. Can you fix that problem now? Yes, but the window for Modula-2 closed decades back. It doesn't have any significant selling points now.