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> These languages have evolved to be where they are today, mostly because hardware has evolved to be where it is today.* No. Pascal and Modula-2 were perfectly

> These languages have evolved to be where they are today, mostly because hardware has evolved to be where it is today.* No. Pascal and Modula-2 were perfectly usable, safe systems programming capable languages 20 years ago. Pascal was widely used in commercial product development (DOS/Windows), Modula-2 was scarce, but taught at universities with high quality development environments available for many platforms and the Oberon OS was based on the language Oberon, which was heavily influenced by/derived from Modula-2. Everything necessary to produce safe, maintainable, fast software was available back then, but lazy/uneducated/stubborn people used C instead and wrote crappy software we still have to use today. It's a shame really.

alayne 12y ago
I'm sure Pascal was really the silver bullet and its failure had nothing to do with Pascal derivatives being academic, non-portable, not very expressive, and having numerous other issues. I think your ad hominem comments about people who implemented in C are in poor taste and not based in reality.
- 4ad 12y ago
  I don't understand why we talk about Pascal at all, since Pascal is just as memory-unsafe as C.
  - ajuc 12y ago
    in one important practical aspect it isn't - strings are length+content in pascal, not null-delimited as in c. It's very important difference.
    - 4ad 12y ago
      You read into buffers, not strings. You can easily have buffers overflows. Pascal arrays are bounds checked, but not when it matters: http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Secure_programming#Buffer_Overflow http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Secure_programming#Buffer....
      - lazyjones 12y ago
        The problems mentioned there (assigning to array elements with out-of-bounds indices) can be avoided by using range checks (-CR option for fpc). It's strange (and silly) that this is apparently off by default for fpc, but it's not a language feature of Pascal.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    No, because Pascal offers proper strings, bound checked arrays,open arrays, real enumerations, numeric ranges and reference parameters.

alayne 12y ago

I'm sure Pascal was really the silver bullet and its failure had nothing to do with Pascal derivatives being academic, non-portable, not very expressive, and having numerous other issues. I think your ad hominem comments about people who implemented in C are in poor taste and not based in reality.

4ad 12y ago
I don't understand why we talk about Pascal at all, since Pascal is just as memory-unsafe as C.
- ajuc 12y ago
  in one important practical aspect it isn't - strings are length+content in pascal, not null-delimited as in c. It's very important difference.
  - 4ad 12y ago
    You read into buffers, not strings. You can easily have buffers overflows. Pascal arrays are bounds checked, but not when it matters: http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Secure_programming#Buffer_Overflow http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Secure_programming#Buffer....
    - lazyjones 12y ago
      The problems mentioned there (assigning to array elements with out-of-bounds indices) can be avoided by using range checks (-CR option for fpc). It's strange (and silly) that this is apparently off by default for fpc, but it's not a language feature of Pascal.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  No, because Pascal offers proper strings, bound checked arrays,open arrays, real enumerations, numeric ranges and reference parameters.