On 06/07/2014 09:23 AM, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote: > On 07 Jun 2014 04:57:19 GMT, Steven D'Aprano > <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> declaimed the following: > >> >> Swift is intended as a new generation *systems language*. The old >> generation of systems languages are things like C, Objective-C, C#, C++, >> Java, Pascal, Algol, and so forth. The new generation are intended to >> fulfil the same niches, but to have syntax and usability closer to that >> of scripting languages. Languages like Go, Rust, Ceylon, and now Swift. >> > Pascal as a systems language? We must have major differences what > constitutes a systems language then... > > Native Pascal had no features to support hitting the hardware or > arbitrary memory addresses/registers. It was a candidate for an > applications language (though even that always felt a stretch to me; as a > teaching language for structured programming it was ideal, though). Try > writing a serial port driver for a memory mapped I/O system using pure > Pascal.
Technically C doesn't either, except via subroutines in libc, though C does have pointers which would be used to access memory. In the old MS DOS days, C would embed assembly to call interrupts and set up interrupt tables, etc. As someone else mentioned recently, Pascal was used as the system language on Mac computers for many years. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
