grauzone wrote:
Walter Bright wrote:
retard wrote:
Fri, 01 Jan 2010 12:19:25 -0800, Walter Bright wrote:
When I then picked up K+R C, I never wrote another line of Pascal. It so
soured me on Pascal that I never got on the later bandwagons of Modula
II, Delphi, TurboPascal, etc. Never even looked at them.

The programming-language-as-religion problem exists only in your imagination. I fail to see Pascal as a religion. I don't know what the pure Pascal compiler you're talking about is, but ordinary Pascal is just another procedural systems programming language like C. It has a bit different syntax ("begin end" vs "{}" and so on), somewhat different rules for some default data types, but it's more or less C wrapped in a syntactic mask.

Pick up a copy of "Pascal User Manual and Report." That's pure Pascal. It's also quite useless. Your program has to be all in one file, for instance. For another, writing I/O always appends a newline. Try writing binary files with that. There was no way to get at the bit representation of a type. Etc.

That's all gone in modern Pascal dialects. Delphi is very similar to D; it's practically a Pascal version of D. The OOP features are the same, except for some small differences, which make Delphi a bit more flexible (virtual and named constructors...).

The problem was, in the 80's, pure Pascal was useless and so needed dialects. Every Pascal vendor added a boatload of extensions, all incompatible with each other. None had enough market share to create a de-facto standard.

All this left a huge opening for C, and the rest, as they say, is history. The market window closed for Pascal.

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