XPost: alt.folklore.computers
From: bowman@montana.com
On Thu, 1 Jan 2026 20:14:30 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:
> On 1/1/26 16:54, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
>> In alt.folklore.computers The Natural Philosopher
>> wrote:
>>> On 01/01/2026 14:28, Peter Flass wrote:
>>>> On 1/1/26 05:49, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>>> On 01/01/2026 03:07, c186282 wrote:
>>>>>> On 12/31/25 17:35, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>>>>> On 31/12/2025 19:21, c186282 wrote:
>>>>>>>> I've writ stuff with five or six levels of nesting
>>>>>>>> but don't like it, usually if/then/else stuff. Oft re-did
>>>>>>>> it later to be more easy to follow. IMHO
>>>>>>>> readability/comprehensibility is as important as
>>>>>>>> functionally correct code.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> 100% agree.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Often write little functions that are only called once. Merely to
>>>>>>> lexically separate atomic functional blocks.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> No idea whether the compiler/linker inlines them or not.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> There is nothing worse than making top level decisions followed by
>>>>>>> some nitty detail to detect some low level error.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> e.g. assume a call to allocate memory always works or the call
>>>>>>> will do the appropriate jump to a global error handler to abort
>>>>>>> things cleanly.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The point of structure was supposed to be to elucidate program
>>>>>>> flow,
>>>>>>> not obscure it with elegant formally correct cruft.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Agree.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> As I've said before, I'm still quite fond of Pascal and write
>>>>>> apps of various size in it (oft first proto-ed in Python).
>>>>>> The structure is 'elegant', but you CAN carry it TOO far, to
>>>>>> where it gets in the way instead of helping things.
>>>>>>
>>>>> My one and only experience of trying to make Pascal do what was
>>>>> trivial in 'C' led me to resolve never ever to touch it again.
>>>>>
>>>>> If you are trying to write - as it turned out I was - a disk driver
>>>>> in pascal, where a given sector may be a byte stream, a series of 16
>>>>> bit integers, or a structure defined by thee first few bytes in the
>>>>> sector, you end up with a massive union that is so cumbersome it is
>>>>> almost impossible to read - let alone use.
>>>>
>>>> Doesn't Pascal have variant records?
>>>>
>>> IIRC it (Turbo Pascal. The amateurs language) had unions of some sort,
>>> but I would have needed about 100 to cover all cases and it was even
>>> then messy.
>>
>> Turbo Pascal could do essentially all thar C could do (and do things
>> which were not strightforward in C, but this is irrelevant here). And
>> do this in a very similar way, once you knew how Turbo Pascal
>> constructs worked. If you really needed 100 variant record in Turbo
>> Pascal,
>> then you needed 100 unions in C. If you could do this more simply in
>> C, you could do this more simply in Turbo Pascal too.
>> Given what you wrote, it looks that you simply lacked experience
>> writing Turbo Pascal. In other words, you were unqualified to do the
>> job that you were supposed to do (write the driver in Turbo Pascal), so
>> you decided to do thing that you know how to do, that is to write it in
>> C.
>>
>> IMO biggest drawback of Turbo Pascal was poor speed of generated code
>> (and size too). For me deal breaker was fact that Turbo Pascal was
>> 16-bit and tied to DOS. DJGCC gave me 32-bit integers and slightly
>> later I switched to Linux, so Turbo Pascal was not longer relevant for
>> me. But if you were programming 16-bit DOS and did not mind poor speed
>> of generated code, than IMO Turbo Pascal was quite decent programming
>> language, quite competitive in expressivity to C.
>
> Now there's Free Pascal. I'm not a Pascal programmer, but I admit I was
> impressed when I looked at what's in the package.
https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
I put that on the Fedora box. It looks nice but life is too short. New
Year's Resolution #1: don't get distracted by passing squirrels.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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