8 ms·

This particular April Fool's joke goes back at least 30 years. I remember getting a chuckle out of it a long time ago. For context for younger readers, it migh

This particular April Fool's joke goes back at least 30 years. I remember getting a chuckle out of it a long time ago. For context for younger readers, it might be worth pointing out that there was for a while a sort of rivalry between C and Pascal adherents. C was the more "modern" and "professional" language, while Pascal was a "teaching" language (or so some of the arguments went). Windows was coded in C, while MacOS -- before it was called MacOS -- was largely Pascal, with a lot of hand-coded 68k assembly for flavor. Pascal devotees would make fun of C in about the same way that a Python programmer might make fun of Perl. C devotees responded by writing an awful lot more code than Pascal programmers did, which eventually shut them up pretty good. Pascal got a boost out of OOP, but by 1995 or thereabouts Pascal didn't really have much of a future left, which was sort of a shame.

dvirsky 12y ago
I learned Pascal when I was in my teens (not my first language, but the first "serious" one after Basic and LOGO) so to me it's always associated with my childish hacking attempts and very bad code IN ALL CAPS. I remember a couple of my friends bought a C book and their code looked so cryptic and weird in comparison, so I didn't bother learning it, and then I kinda lost interest for a few years before picking up more serious programming in my 20s. In the mid-late nineties everyone was doing C++ and Java, so I never got back to Pascal. I had some good fun with it for a few years.
mojuba 12y ago
You could have called me a "Pascal devotee" back then, but I had eventually come to realize verbosity kills creativity and dumped Pascal for good. This { int a[10]; ... } wins over this begin var A: array[0..9] of Integer; ... end; quite simply because the latter takes longer to both read and write. The proof being that none of the more or less serious languages created in the past few decades dared to adopt e.g. begin ... end again.
- merrua 12y ago
  ruby does begin, end. But maybe you were joking? ruby does ommit where it can though.
  - mojuba 12y ago
    Essentially Ruby does only `end` and so does e.g. the Unix shell. I still prefer { } because it stands out in the text better. I should have mentioned verbosity in declarations too, it's not just begin ... end. And I do miss a few of Pascal's neat features, such as using an enum type as an array index type.
- pjc50 12y ago
  And Python dumped even the { }; you can now pile any number of scope closings into a single newline.
  - thret 12y ago
    I've been using mainly Python lately and I still find it weird. I miss my {} and ;.
    - arethuza 12y ago
      Stick with it, when I started using Python I thought significant whitespace was daft - now I think it's brilliantly simple.
    - krylon 12y ago
      When I first came across Python, I was really annoyed at the syntax, specifically at its use of indentation. Nobody tells me how to indent my code! But then I realized that Python only "forced" me to do things I would have done otherwise. I got used to its syntax rather quickly. The one thing I like about using braces for delimiting blocks is that Emacs and Vi allow you to jump from the beginning of a block to the end (and vice versa) in one keystroke. But otherwise, I have to agree with Bjarne Stroustrup (sorry if I mis-spelled his name): Programmers can learn to love absolutely any syntax.
- copsarebastards 12y ago
  > The proof being that none of the more or less serious languages created in the past few decades dared to adopt e.g. begin ... end again. facepalm Except Ruby, OCaml, Erlang, Lua, etc. Frankly, if verbosity is a significant limiting factor on your creativity, a) C is not the solution to your problem, and b) you weren't trying to solve any hard problems anyway. Seriously, if you're doing anything really hard, stuff like thread management and algorithmic complexity is a way bigger limiting factor than minor syntactic differences.
  - mojuba 12y ago
    Frankly, if verbosity is not a limiting factor for you, then you weren't trying to solve hard problems in an elegant way.
  - lmm 12y ago
    Syntax limits everything, it only becomes more important as you're doing hard things. Being able to fit 10% more code on screen is a lot like being 10% smarter, which is the kind of thing you need to make the hard problems even possible.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      By that reasoning APL should rule, so there may be some kind of optimum.
      - kbenson 12y ago
        t may just be that the learning curve for APL is so steep and so long to become truly proficient that most don't get there. I've long held the opinion that much of the criticism of Perl as "line noise" is more to do with people that aren't really proficient in it thinking they are because a subset of the language is very C-like and familiar, and it can be used for quite a while before encountering anything too foreign to someone that knows C. Once that happens though, it leaves those people scratching their heads wondering what they are seeing. Compare and contrast to APL and Lisp, which are obviously different, and Python, which avoids the problem by having a fairly different syntax and a guide for exactly how to do things. I've seen some pretty amazing things in APL, but I can't really understand them. I don't count that against the language, I just haven't spent the time to actually learn APL. As for there being an optimum, I think there is, but I think it has a lot to do with how long and for how complex of things you plan to use the language. Front-loading learning time for a more expressive language may pay dividends later.
doctorwho 12y ago
All the Pascal fanboys did this (and worse) before they gave in and finally converted :) #define begin { #define end }
- pjmlp 12y ago
  By worse do you mean? #define new(x) (malloc(sizeof(x))) #define dispose(x) { if((x) != NULL) { free(x); } } C was so primitive already when compared against Turbo Pascal 6.0
  - Yacoby 12y ago
    Totally worse. free(NULL) preforms no action so there is no requirement for the if statement. ;)
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      Except free(NULL) behavior is undefined. Have you ever bothered to read ANSI C specification? EDIT: Well it appears my recollections of ANSI C have faded away and free(NULL) was actually defined in ANSI C89.
      - pjc50 12y ago
        Wrong, it's defined: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6084218/is-it-good-practice-to-free-a-null-pointer-in-c http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6084218/is-it-good-practi... You didn't say which version of the ANSI C specification.
        masklinn 12y ago
        > You didn't say which version of the ANSI C specification. Which does not matter because all of them clearly define the behavior of free(NULL). The language has been the same since C89[0]: > The free function causes the space pointed to by ptr to be deallocated, that is, made available for further allocation. If ptr is a null pointer, no action occurs. I'm guessing pjmlp confused free(NULL) which is defined and double free which is UB: > if the argument does not match a pointer earlier returned by the calloc , malloc , or realloc function, or if the space has been deallocated by a call to free or realloc , the behavior is undefined. and didn't "bother to read the ANSI C specification" because he was so certain of what he misremembered. [0] http://port70.net/~nsz/c/c89/c89-draft.html#4.10.3.2 http://port70.net/~nsz/c/c89/c89-draft.html#4.10.3.2
caf 12y ago
Pascal sort of lives on in Oracle's PL/SQL, which if not a lineal descendent is definitely at least a cousin.
- alyandon 12y ago
  I always thought Oracle's PL/SQL looked more similar to ALGOL than Pascal. They even mention ALGOL in their documentation. :)
  - cobalt 12y ago
    nope, it's based on Ada
- kjs3 12y ago
  Pascal lives on as Ada.
VLM 12y ago
The perspective I had, having lived thru it, is once the professional / teaching separation happened, pascal was automatically doomed. There is a tension in american culture of educational vs vocational, and the vocational crowd disposed of pascal in a few short years. Very politically incorrect for adherents of that group to teach anything that isn't directly mentioned by name in job requirements or ivy league applications, and the educators realized you can teach "big O" and "quicksort" and "what is a finite automata" in any language, so they had no long term allegiance. So bye bye pascal. (Another interesting analogy to Pascal is cursive handwriting... ever educator, ever, always claimed we'd be required to use it elsewhere although they personally find it a complete waste of time, typical emperor has no clothes or blind conformity to a dead belief system. My own kids are not being taught cursive in school, so progress is possible) Nothing in IT is ever new, fundamentally the JVM concept is just a re-implementation of the "famous at that time" pascal p-code system. Compile pascal to p-code once, run that p-code on any system. And from memory, just like java, you end up needing customized sources for specific machines and specific versions of the p-code interpreter which eliminated that marketing bullet point in actual practice.
- kbenson 12y ago
  My twelve year old learned cursive, but I think they spent comparatively little time on it compared to what I spent. She's never had to write a paper in it. My nine year old hasn't learned it, at least not yet. They both have markedly better (regular) handwriting than me, mine has deteriorated over the years.
jacquesm 12y ago
You forgot that (object) Pascal found it's niche in Borlands excellent 'Delphi' product and that to this day it has its adherents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_%28programming_language%... There is also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Pascal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Pascal I've never used it but I've seen people using it and they were insanely productive and happy about the tools.
- Ayaz 12y ago
  Ah, Free Pascal. It made me remember the first semester at my University where everywhere I looked I found Microsoft. I refused to do assignments and projects on Windows, preferring instead Linux (Slackware, then). In the first semester we studied programming in Pascal and I used the Free Pascal compiler on my Linux to learn and play with the language, while everyone else used Turbo Pascal on DOS/Windows.
- krylon 12y ago
  At the company I work at, we had this guy who had written a program for our accounting department in Delphi. This spring, he quit, and I was given the task of maintaining that code. Normally, I tend to avoid using classical IDEs and prefer Emacs, so it took me a while to get comfortable with Delphi (the IDE). But once I had gotten used to that, I was able to jump right in, despite never having touched Pascal before. Pascal is certainly not the sexiest kind of language around, but it does make it easy to write highly readable code. I can see why people would want to stick to it.
- thaumaturgy 12y ago
  Delphi! You're right, I completely forgot about that. I knew a guy that was writing unholy piles of code for some company in Delphi up until at least 2005 or thereabouts. By then I thought it was really odd that someone was still using that, and good-naturedly teased him about it a little. He swore it was great though.
kabdib 12y ago
In 1987 I went from a company where most work was done in C (and assembly) to Apple, which was a Pascal shop. The thing is, the version of Pascal used at Apple had been extended to the point where there were really few differences between the two languages. - C used curly braces, Pascal used BEGIN/END. Whatever. - C didn't have strings, really; they were broken. Pascal had strings, but of limited length (e.g., Str255), and thus they were pretty broken. Different pain points, but string handling in either language was not much fun. - C had short circuit operators; Pascal didn't. This was the most painful thing to deal with. - C had pointer arithmetic. Pascal had been extended to provide it, too (but didn't do type scaling, so you had to do this manually). - C didn't have nested procedures. Pascal did, but people mostly used them for hiding (the equivalent of 'static' scope function in C). After a couple of months it no longer mattered what I was writing code in. Apple's Pascal had been extended to be semantically so close to C that I barely noticed. A couple years later Apple more or less stopped writing new code in Pascal (everything was in C++, or at least C) and by the early 90s Pascal was all but gone, except for a few holdouts such as the AppleScript group. I don't have fond memories of the unextended Pascal compilers I had to use in college. To put it mildly.
PythonicAlpha 12y ago
I liked Modula 2 much more than Pascal or C. (for those, that don't know it:) Modula 2 was the successor of Pascal from Niklaus Wirth. It had cleaner syntax and many other good features. Its successor, Oberon, was object oriented. [1] But the culprit (and that belongs to all Pascal descendants, as it seems (at least until Modula 2)) was, that the libraries where not very helpful. The standard libraries for Pascal (not the extended ones from Borland Pascal or others) and from Modula 2 where a pain to work with and did not cover the developer needs. I guess, that was one reason for the downfall of Pascal -- some niches (eg. Borland Pascal) where successful, but they lacked the broad covering. C had it all: A syntax, that was popular by many, because it could be typed fast (not everybody will agree that it is an advantage) and a library that covered everything you needed. Also with printf it had a neat solution (according to that time) for a problem, that was really cumbersome to deal with in Pascal or Modula 2. Also you could write C code for one machine and port it rather easily to another, because the libraries had nearly the same API. I account some good part of the initial success of C to the standard C library. After that it was just a question of publicity. Also one mistake of Wirth might have been, that he took different names for his languages. I guess, the languages would have done a little better, if he called it Pascal2 or Pascal++ and after that Pascal++15 or so .... but that is the other problem: Good engineers are usually bad marketeers. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-2
- caf 12y ago
  I really like the insight that printf() was C's original killer feature. It makes a lot of sense.
  - PythonicAlpha 12y ago
    I think, it was just one top feature of the first standard C library. It made printing a lot easier. In standard Pascal or Modula 2, you still had to print every single data type with its own special "WriteX" statement. Even there was a distinction between "WriteString" and "WriteLine", the second wrote a string and added a Newline after it (I am not sure in the moment, if it really took a string or just wrote the NL). In printing to screen, some languages of those days where really spartan.

dvirsky 12y ago

I learned Pascal when I was in my teens (not my first language, but the first "serious" one after Basic and LOGO) so to me it's always associated with my childish hacking attempts and very bad code IN ALL CAPS. I remember a couple of my friends bought a C book and their code looked so cryptic and weird in comparison, so I didn't bother learning it, and then I kinda lost interest for a few years before picking up more serious programming in my 20s. In the mid-late nineties everyone was doing C++ and Java, so I never got back to Pascal. I had some good fun with it for a few years.

mojuba 12y ago

You could have called me a "Pascal devotee" back then, but I had eventually come to realize verbosity kills creativity and dumped Pascal for good. This { int a[10]; ... } wins over this begin var A: array[0..9] of Integer; ... end; quite simply because the latter takes longer to both read and write. The proof being that none of the more or less serious languages created in the past few decades dared to adopt e.g. begin ... end again.

merrua 12y ago
ruby does begin, end. But maybe you were joking? ruby does ommit where it can though.
- mojuba 12y ago
  Essentially Ruby does only `end` and so does e.g. the Unix shell. I still prefer { } because it stands out in the text better. I should have mentioned verbosity in declarations too, it's not just begin ... end. And I do miss a few of Pascal's neat features, such as using an enum type as an array index type.
pjc50 12y ago
And Python dumped even the { }; you can now pile any number of scope closings into a single newline.
- thret 12y ago
  I've been using mainly Python lately and I still find it weird. I miss my {} and ;.
  - arethuza 12y ago
    Stick with it, when I started using Python I thought significant whitespace was daft - now I think it's brilliantly simple.
  - krylon 12y ago
    When I first came across Python, I was really annoyed at the syntax, specifically at its use of indentation. Nobody tells me how to indent my code! But then I realized that Python only "forced" me to do things I would have done otherwise. I got used to its syntax rather quickly. The one thing I like about using braces for delimiting blocks is that Emacs and Vi allow you to jump from the beginning of a block to the end (and vice versa) in one keystroke. But otherwise, I have to agree with Bjarne Stroustrup (sorry if I mis-spelled his name): Programmers can learn to love absolutely any syntax.
copsarebastards 12y ago
> The proof being that none of the more or less serious languages created in the past few decades dared to adopt e.g. begin ... end again. facepalm Except Ruby, OCaml, Erlang, Lua, etc. Frankly, if verbosity is a significant limiting factor on your creativity, a) C is not the solution to your problem, and b) you weren't trying to solve any hard problems anyway. Seriously, if you're doing anything really hard, stuff like thread management and algorithmic complexity is a way bigger limiting factor than minor syntactic differences.
- mojuba 12y ago
  Frankly, if verbosity is not a limiting factor for you, then you weren't trying to solve hard problems in an elegant way.
- lmm 12y ago
  Syntax limits everything, it only becomes more important as you're doing hard things. Being able to fit 10% more code on screen is a lot like being 10% smarter, which is the kind of thing you need to make the hard problems even possible.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    By that reasoning APL should rule, so there may be some kind of optimum.
    - kbenson 12y ago
      t may just be that the learning curve for APL is so steep and so long to become truly proficient that most don't get there. I've long held the opinion that much of the criticism of Perl as "line noise" is more to do with people that aren't really proficient in it thinking they are because a subset of the language is very C-like and familiar, and it can be used for quite a while before encountering anything too foreign to someone that knows C. Once that happens though, it leaves those people scratching their heads wondering what they are seeing. Compare and contrast to APL and Lisp, which are obviously different, and Python, which avoids the problem by having a fairly different syntax and a guide for exactly how to do things. I've seen some pretty amazing things in APL, but I can't really understand them. I don't count that against the language, I just haven't spent the time to actually learn APL. As for there being an optimum, I think there is, but I think it has a lot to do with how long and for how complex of things you plan to use the language. Front-loading learning time for a more expressive language may pay dividends later.

doctorwho 12y ago

All the Pascal fanboys did this (and worse) before they gave in and finally converted :) #define begin { #define end }

pjmlp 12y ago
By worse do you mean? #define new(x) (malloc(sizeof(x))) #define dispose(x) { if((x) != NULL) { free(x); } } C was so primitive already when compared against Turbo Pascal 6.0
- Yacoby 12y ago
  Totally worse. free(NULL) preforms no action so there is no requirement for the if statement. ;)
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    Except free(NULL) behavior is undefined. Have you ever bothered to read ANSI C specification? EDIT: Well it appears my recollections of ANSI C have faded away and free(NULL) was actually defined in ANSI C89.
    - pjc50 12y ago
      Wrong, it's defined: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6084218/is-it-good-practice-to-free-a-null-pointer-in-c http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6084218/is-it-good-practi... You didn't say which version of the ANSI C specification.
      - masklinn 12y ago
        > You didn't say which version of the ANSI C specification. Which does not matter because all of them clearly define the behavior of free(NULL). The language has been the same since C89[0]: > The free function causes the space pointed to by ptr to be deallocated, that is, made available for further allocation. If ptr is a null pointer, no action occurs. I'm guessing pjmlp confused free(NULL) which is defined and double free which is UB: > if the argument does not match a pointer earlier returned by the calloc , malloc , or realloc function, or if the space has been deallocated by a call to free or realloc , the behavior is undefined. and didn't "bother to read the ANSI C specification" because he was so certain of what he misremembered. [0] http://port70.net/~nsz/c/c89/c89-draft.html#4.10.3.2 http://port70.net/~nsz/c/c89/c89-draft.html#4.10.3.2

caf 12y ago

Pascal sort of lives on in Oracle's PL/SQL, which if not a lineal descendent is definitely at least a cousin.

alyandon 12y ago
I always thought Oracle's PL/SQL looked more similar to ALGOL than Pascal. They even mention ALGOL in their documentation. :)
- cobalt 12y ago
  nope, it's based on Ada
kjs3 12y ago
Pascal lives on as Ada.

VLM 12y ago

The perspective I had, having lived thru it, is once the professional / teaching separation happened, pascal was automatically doomed. There is a tension in american culture of educational vs vocational, and the vocational crowd disposed of pascal in a few short years. Very politically incorrect for adherents of that group to teach anything that isn't directly mentioned by name in job requirements or ivy league applications, and the educators realized you can teach "big O" and "quicksort" and "what is a finite automata" in any language, so they had no long term allegiance. So bye bye pascal. (Another interesting analogy to Pascal is cursive handwriting... ever educator, ever, always claimed we'd be required to use it elsewhere although they personally find it a complete waste of time, typical emperor has no clothes or blind conformity to a dead belief system. My own kids are not being taught cursive in school, so progress is possible) Nothing in IT is ever new, fundamentally the JVM concept is just a re-implementation of the "famous at that time" pascal p-code system. Compile pascal to p-code once, run that p-code on any system. And from memory, just like java, you end up needing customized sources for specific machines and specific versions of the p-code interpreter which eliminated that marketing bullet point in actual practice.

kbenson 12y ago
My twelve year old learned cursive, but I think they spent comparatively little time on it compared to what I spent. She's never had to write a paper in it. My nine year old hasn't learned it, at least not yet. They both have markedly better (regular) handwriting than me, mine has deteriorated over the years.

jacquesm 12y ago

You forgot that (object) Pascal found it's niche in Borlands excellent 'Delphi' product and that to this day it has its adherents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_%28programming_language%... There is also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Pascal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Pascal I've never used it but I've seen people using it and they were insanely productive and happy about the tools.

Ayaz 12y ago
Ah, Free Pascal. It made me remember the first semester at my University where everywhere I looked I found Microsoft. I refused to do assignments and projects on Windows, preferring instead Linux (Slackware, then). In the first semester we studied programming in Pascal and I used the Free Pascal compiler on my Linux to learn and play with the language, while everyone else used Turbo Pascal on DOS/Windows.
krylon 12y ago
At the company I work at, we had this guy who had written a program for our accounting department in Delphi. This spring, he quit, and I was given the task of maintaining that code. Normally, I tend to avoid using classical IDEs and prefer Emacs, so it took me a while to get comfortable with Delphi (the IDE). But once I had gotten used to that, I was able to jump right in, despite never having touched Pascal before. Pascal is certainly not the sexiest kind of language around, but it does make it easy to write highly readable code. I can see why people would want to stick to it.
thaumaturgy 12y ago
Delphi! You're right, I completely forgot about that. I knew a guy that was writing unholy piles of code for some company in Delphi up until at least 2005 or thereabouts. By then I thought it was really odd that someone was still using that, and good-naturedly teased him about it a little. He swore it was great though.

kabdib 12y ago

In 1987 I went from a company where most work was done in C (and assembly) to Apple, which was a Pascal shop. The thing is, the version of Pascal used at Apple had been extended to the point where there were really few differences between the two languages. - C used curly braces, Pascal used BEGIN/END. Whatever. - C didn't have strings, really; they were broken. Pascal had strings, but of limited length (e.g., Str255), and thus they were pretty broken. Different pain points, but string handling in either language was not much fun. - C had short circuit operators; Pascal didn't. This was the most painful thing to deal with. - C had pointer arithmetic. Pascal had been extended to provide it, too (but didn't do type scaling, so you had to do this manually). - C didn't have nested procedures. Pascal did, but people mostly used them for hiding (the equivalent of 'static' scope function in C). After a couple of months it no longer mattered what I was writing code in. Apple's Pascal had been extended to be semantically so close to C that I barely noticed. A couple years later Apple more or less stopped writing new code in Pascal (everything was in C++, or at least C) and by the early 90s Pascal was all but gone, except for a few holdouts such as the AppleScript group. I don't have fond memories of the unextended Pascal compilers I had to use in college. To put it mildly.

PythonicAlpha 12y ago

I liked Modula 2 much more than Pascal or C. (for those, that don't know it:) Modula 2 was the successor of Pascal from Niklaus Wirth. It had cleaner syntax and many other good features. Its successor, Oberon, was object oriented. [1] But the culprit (and that belongs to all Pascal descendants, as it seems (at least until Modula 2)) was, that the libraries where not very helpful. The standard libraries for Pascal (not the extended ones from Borland Pascal or others) and from Modula 2 where a pain to work with and did not cover the developer needs. I guess, that was one reason for the downfall of Pascal -- some niches (eg. Borland Pascal) where successful, but they lacked the broad covering. C had it all: A syntax, that was popular by many, because it could be typed fast (not everybody will agree that it is an advantage) and a library that covered everything you needed. Also with printf it had a neat solution (according to that time) for a problem, that was really cumbersome to deal with in Pascal or Modula 2. Also you could write C code for one machine and port it rather easily to another, because the libraries had nearly the same API. I account some good part of the initial success of C to the standard C library. After that it was just a question of publicity. Also one mistake of Wirth might have been, that he took different names for his languages. I guess, the languages would have done a little better, if he called it Pascal2 or Pascal++ and after that Pascal++15 or so .... but that is the other problem: Good engineers are usually bad marketeers. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-2

caf 12y ago
I really like the insight that printf() was C's original killer feature. It makes a lot of sense.
- PythonicAlpha 12y ago
  I think, it was just one top feature of the first standard C library. It made printing a lot easier. In standard Pascal or Modula 2, you still had to print every single data type with its own special "WriteX" statement. Even there was a distinction between "WriteString" and "WriteLine", the second wrote a string and added a Newline after it (I am not sure in the moment, if it really took a string or just wrote the NL). In printing to screen, some languages of those days where really spartan.