Perhaps at
some point customers will actually start to recognize the
merits of programming in a high-level language, rather than C which is
just portable assembly language, but that doesn't seem to have happened
yet. I thought the Heartbleed bug might move us in that direction, but
it hasn't.
C is not completely portable. FORTRAN was described as being as portable
as syphilis.
C is not quite an assembly language. But most implementations of C will
be fairly cooperative about "get out of the way" when you do need to go
low-level.
Job's "dream team" designing the Lisa showed one example of when a high
level language is NOT an ideal solution. They clearly demonstrated many
examples where Theory and Reality don't match. Use of Pascal for writing
an OS betrays a lack of familiarity with hardware performance needs.
(Need for greater hardware performance doubles every 17 months, rendering
Moore's law a futile attempt at catching up.)
Significant components of the Lisa OS had to be rewritten in assembly
language (or in some cases, maybe just C) to get acceptable performance.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at
xenosoft.com
Wasn't Apollo Computer's Domain OS written in Pascal? I actually recall
getting real work done on those workstations. It didn't suck...
Rob.