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What Was Your First Programming Language?
07-09-2015, 07:36 AM
Post: #95
RE: What Was Your First Programming Language?
(07-09-2015 06:53 AM)HrastProgrammer Wrote:  So, a language should not be extended? It should be left as invented in 1970. or something and if new functionality is needed - new languages with new names should be "invented" instead?

Well, in the case of Pascal - yes. Niklaus Wirth was adamant that he wanted a small and efficient language for teaching purposes, and so it lacked a number of important features for commercial development. Brian Kernighan agreed - see his famous paper, Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language, for a full analysis. I was working with Pascal/M, which was a fairly pure implementation of the language as documented by Wirth, and I found it quite painful.

Turbo Pascal subsequently introduced a number of extensions that solved some of the problems, but were contrary to the spirit of the language. For example, I remember reading some Turbo Pascal code and suddenly finding a variable called "buflen" but which I couldn't find declared anywhere - what is this thing, and where did it come from? It turns out it was a pseudo-variable that was unique to the Turbo implementation.

It was these kinds of problems that led me to PL/I Subset G, which I always thought of as a "Pascal that's not afraid to get its hands dirty".

Turbo Pascal was an incredible product and hugely influential in its time - a lot of popular applications were written in it, and still are, using derivatives like Delphi - but I've always been of the opinion that it shouldn't have been called "Pascal". Wirth himself moved on to Modula and especially Modula-2, which solved the problems with Pascal.

--- Les
[http://www.lesbell.com.au]
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RE: What Was Your First Programming Language? - Les Bell - 07-09-2015 07:36 AM



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