12 May
2005
12 May
'05
9:52 a.m.
On Thu, 12 May 2005, John Foust wrote:
Right. Just for the record, it was you knocking Pascal and not me, so all
flames should be directed at you ;)
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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At 10:26 AM 5/12/2005, Vintage Computer Festival
wrote:
My comment was directed specifically at the UCSD Pascal system, and
furthermore directly at the Apple version. Pascal as a language is not
bad, and is probably the best language for doing what it was invented for,
which is teaching high level programming. And of course, tons of useful
production software has been developed in Pascal.
Let's face it: the UCSD Pascal system just
sucks.
Of course Pascal has its flaws, and they became more obvious as
people tried to use this designed-for-education language as a
application production language. In its best years, it was
a very useful packaging of an integrated editor, file system
and interactive compilation and almost-debugging. I was willing
to go along with it and learn
Pascal until one day I put in the wrong disk during a proscribed disk
swap and, instead of having proper error recovery, the OS proceeded to
overwrite my disk with something else, losing all my source code. I swore
off Pascal from that moment on.
That's the P-System operating system shell or your app, not Pascal.