On Fri, 8 Jul 2022 at 21:35, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Everybody and their brother made Pascal derivatives: Ada, Modula-2, > Modula-3, etc. While Dr. Wirth was not directly involved, there was > also a newer "Extended" Pascal standard in 1988 (ISO 10206) that also > had modules. But even Wirth kept going and started developing Oberon > in 1986. "Standard" Modula-2 (N.B. GNU GM2) came in 1996 (ISO 10514). > (So it was too many competing languages, honestly.)
I think this is a misrepresentation and unfair. Pascal was just one point in a continuous series of work by Prof. Wirth and his associates. As it happens, the computer industry seized on some of these, made multiple 3rd party compilers, many with proprietary extensions. So you say "Dr Wirth was not involved" as a global statement which is not true. Prof. Wirth's work goes: (Prehistory of Pascal: he was involved in the committee to modernise ALGOL-60. His proposals were rejected, in favour of more complex ones from Adriaan van Wijngaarden, whose revised language became ALGOL-68 and which more or less sank ALGOL as a language.) Wirth took his proposals and made his own language, which he renamed Pascal. That got widely used and adopted. Wirth refined and worked on the language further and created Modula. (So in a way, Modula was Pascal 2.0.) Modula was not a success. He quickly moved on and made Modula-2. That did quite well for a while. It was significant on DOS PCs in the early days; JPS Topspeed Modula-2 was the fastest native-code compiler on the PC and did well for a while. Acorn attempted to build the OS for its new CPU, the ARM, in Modula-2. So, Modula-2 can be seen as Pascal 3.0. Then others took Modula-2 and extended it, to make Modula-3, but that was nothing to do with Wirth. Next Wirth built Oberon (1987). Oberon is sort of Pascal 4. Oberon is still around and still in use so it's arguably proved to be a survivor. Then it gets really complicated. One line goes Oberon -> Object Oberon -> Oberon 2 -> Oberon/L -> (renamed to) Component Pascal Another line of development was: Oberon -> Oberon-07 Another line of development was: Oberon -> Active Oberon -> Zonnon Wirth was involved with several of these, as he refined and reconsidered his ideas. You also said: > (So it was too many competing languages, honestly.) Also not really fair. I mean, arguably, yes, but there are also dozens of variants of C. There's original C, K&R C, Plan 9 C, ANSI C, C 99, C11, C17 and soon C23. All are C. All are different. Code from one may not work in others. And of course there is Limbo, Go, C++, C#, D, and myriad variants. All are forms of C with extensions and occasionally removals or refinements or deprecations. Some of them are hugely popular and widely-used, e.g. C++, but are nothing to do with C's original designers. Some are directly from C's designers but are obscure, such as Plan 9 C and Limbo. Some are directly from C's designers but also are big successes, such as Go. It's not possible to say which is more "real" or legitimate. There is no single coherent version numbering system. Different compilers have nearly-but-not-completely overlapping subsets, e.g. Intel C and GCC and Clang. It's complicated. If you exclude ones from from the AT&T team as not really being C then you exclude many of the most important variants. It's arguably too many language but nobody says that of it. Well, the Pascal line is the same. There are at least half a dozen generations. Given the ones that have been adopted outside Wirth's institutions and used in many countries, there are things that we could call Pascal, Pascal 3 (Modula-2), Pascal 4 (Oberon), and several different successors to Pascal 4. There are also non-Wirth variants that had some adoption, including Modula-2+, Modula-3,Turbo Pascal, Object Pascal, Delphi, Kylix and FreePascal. All legit, all sold and were widely-used at some points in time. You can't say that there are too many Pascal variants unless you also say that there are too many C variants. -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven UK: (+44) 7939-087884 ~ Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
