18 Feb
2015
18 Feb
'15
5:20 p.m.
I was introduced to Pascal in a high-school AP computer science course ca.
1986. It was a real eye-opener, and seemed quite powerful after only using
BASIC and the occasional chunks of borrowed 6502 ASM.
Personally, I thought it was an excellent teaching language - at least for
HS students in the late 1980s. I really enjoyed learning to use it - though
as someone who'd had almost ten years' time with BASIC, I found the
emphasis on recursive (sub-)routines to be a bit difficult to grasp.
Something about it just seemed... kludge-y. But functions were a very
welcome addition..
Of course, I've forgotten it all!
On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 5:05 PM, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 5:41 PM, Toby Thain <toby
at telegraphics.com.au>
wrote:
Pascal is somewhat under-rated (not to mention a
litle ahead of its
time, as
it turns out). Maybe this is because, like Lisp,
those who snark about it
are too young to have used it :-)
I snark about Pascal all the time. I encountered it in a professional
capacity in 1987. My employer had two major projects. One was a new
product, written in Pascal (because that's the language the guy he
hired to write the DOS app knew - I had to write some assembler stuff
for the heavy-lifting), and the other was adapting an existing
custom-built-project (an industrial ultrasonic inspection system) on
TSXplus for the PDP-11 where several jobs, written in Pascal
collected, munged, displayed, and printed the scans. My task on that
one was to "double the scan density". Where I learned to hate Pascal
was fighting with formatted I/O streams to support multiple file types
(numbers of "records" per scanline) in the same task. To shorten the
story, the simplest way out of the tarpit was to dup the display code
and change 768 to 1536 everywhere it appeared and mod the scheduler to
kick the display request to the "display single density scans" task or
the "display double density scans" task as required.
Utterly trivial in languages that trust the programmer to handle
unformatted I/O.
-ethan