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

John Foust jfoust at threedee.com
Thu Feb 19 10:26:23 CST 2015


At 05:05 PM 2/18/2015, Ethan Dicks wrote:
>I snark about Pascal all the time.  I encountered it in a professional
>capacity in 1987.  [...]
>Utterly trivial in languages that trust the programmer to handle
>unformatted I/O.

All true, but doesn't it make you wonder why Turbo Pascal
was such a popular development environment for the PC for so long?

Was it the sheer will power and marketing of Borland, or was
it the volume of developers who didn't need intensive low-level I/O?

By '85, there were several C compilers for the PC and I even
remember using Gimpel C-terp, a C interpreter that made development
and debugging easier.

- John



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