3 ms·

There is a love and hate relation from programmers who started from it. Hate goes from the fact different Pascals didn't manage to settle an agreement on standa

There is a love and hate relation from programmers who started from it. Hate goes from the fact different Pascals didn't manage to settle an agreement on standard. Well, there are ISO Standard Pascal and ISO Extended Pascal. But does Turbo Pascal conform to any of them? No. So do Apple Pascal, UCSD Pascal, whatever. As much as I hate C enemies, I must admit they were for some reason better at standard. If Pascals were such religiously adopting the standard and if C was remaining as fragmented as Pascal, with "otherwise" in one dialect and "else" in another one, then Pascal could win. Probably not the Turbo Pascal as we know it. Another Pascal, standard enough Pascal. Or maybe it should have been Modula-2. Amiga had TDI Modula-2. Don't know if TopSpeed Modula-2 and TDI Modula-2 were source compatible, but I guess far more than different Pascals. This table is built by ex. Pascal developer that moved to Ada: https://p2ada.sourceforge.net/pascada.htm https://p2ada.sourceforge.net/pascada.htm Indeed, Ada's standard conformance is a breathe of fresh air. But Amiga had no Ada compiler, and had Modula-2 compiler. So for the sake of good guys' winning, if time machine moves me to 80s, I would pick Modula-2 for every platform. Nowadays Ada is a choice of good guy

kjs3 1y ago
Borland had Turbo Modula-2. Modula-2 is a pretty good language, and very small. It was the teaching language for my OS course in college. Then we got into Ada, and I thought it was a much more 'industrial' language; much more batteries included.
badsectoracula 1y ago
AFAIK in practice Turbo Pascal won because it was cheaper, faster and provided all the necessary tools that standard Pascal didn't - though those tools were largely inspired from UCSD Pascal and after Turbo Pascal other Pascal implementations basically replicated its syntax, so in a way Turbo Pascal became the defacto standard. I find it kinda amusing that Free Pascal was Turbo Pascal compatible from 1997 but it only fully implemented a standard Pascal mode (the compiler supports multiple dialects) just ~10 years ago (and still doesn't support the Extended Pascal syntax).

kjs3 1y ago

Borland had Turbo Modula-2. Modula-2 is a pretty good language, and very small. It was the teaching language for my OS course in college. Then we got into Ada, and I thought it was a much more 'industrial' language; much more batteries included.

badsectoracula 1y ago

AFAIK in practice Turbo Pascal won because it was cheaper, faster and provided all the necessary tools that standard Pascal didn't - though those tools were largely inspired from UCSD Pascal and after Turbo Pascal other Pascal implementations basically replicated its syntax, so in a way Turbo Pascal became the defacto standard. I find it kinda amusing that Free Pascal was Turbo Pascal compatible from 1997 but it only fully implemented a standard Pascal mode (the compiler supports multiple dialects) just ~10 years ago (and still doesn't support the Extended Pascal syntax).