[Cialug] Question?

[Leeland Heins]

On Tuesday 26 October 2004 12:22 pm, Kevin C. Smith wrote:
> With dotnet and mono coming to linux. I was woundering --
> Why not pascal?

Probably because a lot of programmers don't like it?  I personally
never liked the syntax.  I learned C before Pascal, and had to use
Pascal in college.  Pascal seemed painfully verbose and stilted
in comparison to C.  Also Pascal suffered from the fact that it was
never intended for use other than as a teaching language.  The
problem was the original language specification from the Wirth
book was not nearly complete enough for use as a production
language.  That led to lots of vendor-specific extensions to try
to alleviate those shortcomings.  That led to terrible incompatibility
between different implementations.  While I would not say that C
portability between different OSes (particularly between *nix and
MS-DOS/Windows based systems) is far from perfect, the problems
there are mostly libraries, not core syntax.  There were major
problems porting between popular Pascal compilers even on the
same platform.  You couldn't compile most Turbo Pascal programs,
for example, with Microsoft Pascal, even on MS-DOS.  And
porting between Turbo Pascal and VAX Pascal on VMS or Berkeley
Pascal on UNIX was a major chore.  Sure, eventually there were
ISO standards, but they came too late and still weren't complete
enough to give anything resembling compatibility.  Add to those
problems the fact that Wirth, Pascal's inventor, abandoned it in
favor of first Modula-2 and then Oberon, and the fact that the
major versions such as Turbo Pascal splintered when they added
object extensions (although there was Objective C and C++, it
was certainly C++ that was the decisive victor in the OO follow-on
to C).  So what it comes down to is that other than Kylix, Pascal
is dead, dead, dead.  And I for one, mourn it not.

-- 
Leeland Heins, leeh@softwarejanitor.com