Walter Bright Wrote: > 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.
Borland Pascal, Borland Pascal with Objects and Borland Delphi became the de-facto standard. They dropped the ball and Freepascal/Lazarus picked up the ball. Freepascal now includes templates. > > All this left a huge opening for C, and the rest, as they say, is > history. The market window closed for Pascal.