12 May
2005
12 May
'05
8:49 a.m.
At 10:26 AM 5/12/2005, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
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.
For several years in college in the early 80s, I made a relatively
tremendous amount of cash as a private tutor of business students
who were required to take a entry-level programming language course.
Most took Pascal.
It was a wonderful lesson for my future consulting work, too,
learning that you can make more money less strenuously by
patiently explaining something to someone than if you had
been paid to do it for them.
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.
"Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language", by Brian Kernighan,
circa 1981:
http://www.threedee.com/jcm/psystem/whypascal.html
- John