4 ms·

I think OP is just trying to demystify the complexity of compliers for the sake of an educational resource. It's high quality work, compressed to a very small l

I think OP is just trying to demystify the complexity of compliers for the sake of an educational resource. It's high quality work, compressed to a very small line count

andai 2y ago
Well, Python and Pascal were designed as a teaching language, and ended up being remarkably good for actual programming.
- f1shy 2y ago
  Also Basic, wasn’t it?
- keyle 2y ago
  I didn't know this regarding Pascal, do you have any source ref on this?
  - zabzonk 2y ago
    From wikipedia: "Pascal was influenced by the ALGOL W efforts, with the explicit goals of teaching programming in a structured fashion and for the development of system software.[5] A generation of students used Pascal as an introductory language in undergraduate courses." Its grammar made it relatively easy to write compilers for the language, which could be done as undergraduate exercises. Of course, this did not make it so popular with professional programmers - see http://eprg.org/computerphile/pascal.pdf http://eprg.org/computerphile/pascal.pdf by Brian Kernighan, although extended Pascals such as Delphi were very productive in the Windows environment.
    - musicale 2y ago
      I have the greatest respect for Prof. Kernighan, but history hasn't been kind to C's unbounded arrays and strings, however convenient they may be for the programmer. Moreover, just two years after his critique, Turbo Pascal would come out with an environment that is still revered as a pioneering and exceptionally productive IDE. It outsold C compilers by multiple orders of magnitude in the mid-1980s. (And that's ignoring unlicensed copies.) Turbo Pascal's successor, Delphi, was a successful rapid application development environment, and still being used today. Pascal was used extensively at Apple for the Apple III and Lisa, and was also the original development environment for Mac apps.[1] But he was probably right about Ada, which has survived and may even be enjoying something of a renaissance as a fix for the sins of C (and C++) that isn't as alienating as Rust. [1] https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_applelisapriefHistoryofAppleComputersWorkwiththePa_6767178 https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_applelisapriefHistoryo...
      - zabzonk 2y ago
        I used to be a professional Delphi programmer, but I would not have described Delphi as "extremely successful", partially due to its mismanagement by the various owners of the IP. Its noticeable that Delphi's inventor went on to far greater success with a C-like language - C#.
        musicale 2y ago
        Edited. Fortunately C# (like Java) fixes what Prof. Kernighan praised about C - unbounded pointers/arrays/strings. At the expense of unpredictable performance due to garbage collection. C# and Java (and JavaScript) retain C-like syntax, but their underpinnings/VMs were heavily influenced by Self and Smalltalk. (Note Pascal also pioneered bytecode compilers.)
        pjmlp 2y ago
        It surely was all over the place in Europe, and still has some spots, hence why in Germany, you can keep coming to yearly Delphi conferences. https://entwickler-konferenz.de/program-en/ https://entwickler-konferenz.de/program-en/
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        His critice was already outdated by 1978, because Modula-2, Pascal's sucessor, explicitly designed for systems programming, after Niklaus Wirth sabatical year at Xerox PARC, where he learned about Mesa, Xerox Star written in Mesa, the IDE like experience of Tajo and XDE, he came back to ETHZ and created Modula-2, Lilith personal workstation and related OS in Modula-2. Modula-2, designed for memory safe systems programming, in 1978, succedding Pascal, had support for unbounded arrays and strings. By the way, GCC nowadays has GNU Modula-2 integrated in the official set of supported languages.
      - sitkack 2y ago
        I really really dislike the, "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language" esp when you have a horse in the race as he did.
      - madmountaingoat 2y ago
    - keyle 2y ago
      v nice thanks. I think Pascal was the first language we were thought in school, just before C.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

I think OP is just trying to demystify the complexity of compliers for the sake of an educational resource. It's high quality work, compressed to a very small line count

andai 2y ago

Well, Python and Pascal were designed as a teaching language, and ended up being remarkably good for actual programming.

f1shy 2y ago
Also Basic, wasn’t it?
keyle 2y ago
I didn't know this regarding Pascal, do you have any source ref on this?
- zabzonk 2y ago
  From wikipedia: "Pascal was influenced by the ALGOL W efforts, with the explicit goals of teaching programming in a structured fashion and for the development of system software.[5] A generation of students used Pascal as an introductory language in undergraduate courses." Its grammar made it relatively easy to write compilers for the language, which could be done as undergraduate exercises. Of course, this did not make it so popular with professional programmers - see http://eprg.org/computerphile/pascal.pdf http://eprg.org/computerphile/pascal.pdf by Brian Kernighan, although extended Pascals such as Delphi were very productive in the Windows environment.
  - musicale 2y ago
    I have the greatest respect for Prof. Kernighan, but history hasn't been kind to C's unbounded arrays and strings, however convenient they may be for the programmer. Moreover, just two years after his critique, Turbo Pascal would come out with an environment that is still revered as a pioneering and exceptionally productive IDE. It outsold C compilers by multiple orders of magnitude in the mid-1980s. (And that's ignoring unlicensed copies.) Turbo Pascal's successor, Delphi, was a successful rapid application development environment, and still being used today. Pascal was used extensively at Apple for the Apple III and Lisa, and was also the original development environment for Mac apps.[1] But he was probably right about Ada, which has survived and may even be enjoying something of a renaissance as a fix for the sins of C (and C++) that isn't as alienating as Rust. [1] https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_applelisapriefHistoryofAppleComputersWorkwiththePa_6767178 https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_applelisapriefHistoryo...
    - zabzonk 2y ago
      I used to be a professional Delphi programmer, but I would not have described Delphi as "extremely successful", partially due to its mismanagement by the various owners of the IP. Its noticeable that Delphi's inventor went on to far greater success with a C-like language - C#.
      - musicale 2y ago
        Edited. Fortunately C# (like Java) fixes what Prof. Kernighan praised about C - unbounded pointers/arrays/strings. At the expense of unpredictable performance due to garbage collection. C# and Java (and JavaScript) retain C-like syntax, but their underpinnings/VMs were heavily influenced by Self and Smalltalk. (Note Pascal also pioneered bytecode compilers.)
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        It surely was all over the place in Europe, and still has some spots, hence why in Germany, you can keep coming to yearly Delphi conferences. https://entwickler-konferenz.de/program-en/ https://entwickler-konferenz.de/program-en/
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      His critice was already outdated by 1978, because Modula-2, Pascal's sucessor, explicitly designed for systems programming, after Niklaus Wirth sabatical year at Xerox PARC, where he learned about Mesa, Xerox Star written in Mesa, the IDE like experience of Tajo and XDE, he came back to ETHZ and created Modula-2, Lilith personal workstation and related OS in Modula-2. Modula-2, designed for memory safe systems programming, in 1978, succedding Pascal, had support for unbounded arrays and strings. By the way, GCC nowadays has GNU Modula-2 integrated in the official set of supported languages.
    - sitkack 2y ago
      I really really dislike the, "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language" esp when you have a horse in the race as he did.
    - madmountaingoat 2y ago
  - keyle 2y ago
    v nice thanks. I think Pascal was the first language we were thought in school, just before C.
- deleted 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]