On Sat, 07 Jun 2014 11:13:42 -0400, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote: > About a decade later, said manager retired and confessed that the choice > of Pascal was a mistake
There's Pascal and there's Pascal. Standard Pascal, I admit, is woefully unsuitable for real world work. But Pascal with suitable extensions was good enough for the first 6 generations of the Macintosh operating system and key applications, at a time when *nobody* was even coming close to doing what the Mac was capable of. (Admittedly, a certain number of the core OS libraries, most famously Quickdraw, were handwritten in assembly by a real genius.) By the mid-80s, Apple's SANE (Standard Apple Numeric Environment) was quite possibly the best environment for doing IEEE-754 numeric work anywhere. But of course, Macintoshes were toys, right, and got no respect, even when the Mac G4 was the first PC powerful enough to be classified by US export laws as a supercomputer. [Disclaimer: Pascal on the Mac might have been far ahead of the pack when it came to supporting IEEE-754, but it didn't have the vast number of (variable-quality) Fortran libraries available on other systems. And while it is true that the G4 was classified as a supercomputer, that was only for four months until the Clinton administration changed the laws. Apple, of course, played that for every cent of advertising as it could.] -- Steven D'Aprano http://import-that.dreamwidth.org/ -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
