And with it we landed in a world full of buffer overruns and memory errors exploits.
Sure Pascal was a bit of a pain sometimes to use, but it did promote safety. Now we have to fight an uphill battle with C developers to make them realize the benefict of using safer languages while fixing security holes every day. -- Paulo "Walter Bright" <newshou...@digitalmars.com> wrote in message news:ia22e1$1up...@digitalmars.com... > Russel Winder wrote: >> Pascal was never really intended as a production language, it was >> intended for teaching programming and the abstract concepts behind >> programming. I suggest that in the period 1972-82 it achieved its goals >> admirably. From 1984 onwards it was clearly becoming insufficient for >> the task and things moved on. >> >> Most of the commercial Pascal varieties tried to be variants on Modula-2 >> but labelled themselves Pascal, and here lie the real problems and the >> hassles that led to Pascal ending up with a bad name -- one it should >> not be landed with in perpituity. > > I think Pascal did a good job of promoting "structured programming", the > buzzword of the 70's. > > "User Friendly" was the buzzword of the 80s. > > "Object Oriented" for the 90s. > > "Generic" for the 00s. > > "Functional" for the teens, I suppose. Too soon to tell. > > I'm less forgiving of Pascal than you are. I have the original PUM&R, and > yes, it was designed as a teaching language. But still, a teaching > language shouldn't be so awfully crippled and with such huge mistakes > (array handling). > > Modula-2 failed because by the time it appeared, everyone fed up with > Pascal's failings had moved to C (and then C++). I remember a Modula-2 > vendor telling me in the late 80's that they'd screwed up and backed the > wrong horse, they should have gone with C++. > > Modula-2 also screwed up by not calling itself Pascal-2. > > I used OMSI Pascal in 1978 or so, I don't think it was related to > Modula-2. Naturally, it had extensions, too. Pascal is unusable without > extensions, even for simple programs. > > Pascal annoyed me so much, and C was *so* much better, I never gave M2 a > serious look. Consider this: C today is still a dominant language, and is > largely unchanged from the early 80's. But Pascal evolved into Modula, > Modula 2, Oberon, Delphi, Object Pascal, etc., always trying to find a > workable combination of features. Meanwhile, the world passed it by.