29 Apr
2016
29 Apr
'16
1:33 p.m.
On 29 Apr 2016, at 22:24 , Paul Koning <paulkoning
at comcast.net> wrote:
Pedagogical language? I'm not sure. BASIC, yes. But Pascal I believe was a serious
language. I learned it in one week, and used it to build a code generator for a compiler
in a compiler construction class. We originally used PL/1 there (the Cornell
implementation) but had to stop because it was utterly unreliable, and switched to PDP-10
Pascal instead. Worked great.
Pascal most certainly was a pedagogical language - it started out as a pseudo-code
notation, which was eventually implemented.
Interestingly, Lisp was originally just a mathematical notation for computer programs
devised by John McCarthy; Steve Russell realized (to McCarthy's surprise) that it was
actually possible to implement the eval function, turning Lisp into a programming language
rather than just a notation.
So does
Pascal.
Which didn't have a lot of the capabilities needed to be system language at
_that point in time_ (remember, this is about 'why did C succeed, back then');
it was, after all, originally designed as a pedagogical language.