[cctalk] Re: Random items on Pascal #3

Not surprising, since that's not what it is all about. Both, like their predecessor ALGOL-60 as well as successors like Ada, are strongly typed languages where doing unsafe stuff is made very hard. Contrast that with C, which sets out to make it easy to do unsafe things and partly for that reason has a feeble type system. So doing low level stuff like device drivers is difficult, unless you create extensions to break out of the type system. An example of how to do that is the Burroughs extension of ALGOL called ESPOL, which is what they used to write the OS. Actually, Burroughs did a number of extended versions for different purposes; there's also DCALGOL (Data comm ALGOL) intended for writing communications software. Why that's separate from ESPOL I don't really know; I only ever got to do regular ALGOL programming on Burroughs mainframes. One reason for that: those systems depend on the compilers for their security; if ordinary users got access to ESPOL they could write dangerous code, but in ALGOL they cannot. paul