Pascal not considered harmful - was Re: Rich kids are into COBOL

I started using Pascal on CDC 6000 series machines. At that point in time the other languages that were widely available on CDC hardware were Fortran and assembler. Within a year or so we dropped assembler as our main systems language and switched to Pascal. Pretty much everything we could do in assembler we could do in Pascal in fewer lines of source code. Writing efficient assembler on CDC machines was not particularly easy and the Pascal compiler generated fairly good code, so we saw little performance difference. With the mixture of 6 bit and 12 bit character codes (plus a few others) along with the bizarre end of line conventions, Pascal code tended to be easier to understand and maintain than assembler. Wirth had a pretty good understanding of the CDC architecture having written several compilers for it before Pascal. Pascal was tuned to that architecture and the CDC operating systems. Some of the features that people not used to CDC machines find strange were aimed at the shortcomings of the CDC machines. In many ways Pascal on the CDC machines was similar to C on PDP11s. I worked on both for several years and found switching back and forth to be relatively easy. On the CDC machines Pascal was far from academic and useless, particularly in practice. You need to understand the machine architecture and system environment where a language was developed to judge whether it was practical or not. -----Original Message----- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Tor Arntsen Sent: February-19-15 7:20 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Pascal not considered harmful - was Re: Rich kids are into COBOL On 19 February 2015 at 17:40, geneb <geneb at deltasoft.com> wrote: That's right. But there's more than I/O. The academic-tool variant of Pascal, as Wirth designed it, was simply useless in practice, or extremely cumbersome to use because you couldn't design a function which could take arrays of variable sizes as input, you had to declare one function for each size. Hopeless. You couldn't do any real data processing that way. Turbo Pascal, and every other useful variant, e.g. the Pascal I used on a minicomputer, fixed that part, and often added I/O extensions in various ways. In short, they made the language flexible, and thus usable. Then TP of course had that fast edit-compile-execute cycle, a low price, and the super-easy IDE. The learning curve from getting your hands on TP to actually use it was very low. Actually the Turbo Pascal IDE is still the only IDE I like. I don't use any of the modern ones, they are just in the way. But I recently tried the CP/M TP version again, haven't used it since the eighties.. and I still like the IDE. Re-learned it in seconds.