XPost: alt.folklore.computers
From: antispam@fricas.org
In alt.folklore.computers Peter Flass wrote:
> On 1/5/26 21:18, c186282 wrote:
>> On 1/5/26 22:37, Peter Flass wrote:
>>> On 1/5/26 17:57, c186282 wrote:
>>>> On 1/5/26 13:49, John Ames wrote:
>>>>> On Sat, 3 Jan 2026 08:31:33 +0000
>>>>> The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> "The statement "Pascal has no I/O" originates from
>>>>>> Brian Kernighan’s 1981 essay, "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite
>>>>>> Programming Language".
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Kernighan argued that the original 1970 definition of Pascal was
>>>>>> severely limited for systems programming because:
>>>>>
>>>>> Yeah, that was it - not *no* I/O in the sense that was true of Algol,
>>>>> but weird and constrained in ways that betray its origins as a teaching
>>>>> language. Mainly, files are assumed to be of a uniform structure; you
>>>>> can have a FILE OF CHAR or a FILE OF INTEGER, but not a file containing
>>>>> both strings and integers. If you want to do *that,* you're supposed to
>>>>> make a struct and have a FILE OF that, but this too has to be the same
>>>>> across the whole thing. Files of mixed or variable structure? Who uses
>>>>> *those!?*
>>>>>
>>>>> Like many of Wirth's design choices, it sounds simple on paper but is
>>>>> unnecessarily confining in the Real World - and, as Kernighan points
>>>>> out, there were no "escape hatches" for extending the language from
>>>>> within, leading to a bunch of proprietary and mutually-incompatible
>>>>> variants. Obviously, it's been decades and the landscape has changed
>>>>> substantially, but it really was dunderheaded at the time.
>>>>
>>>> Wirth was an 'academic' - and Pascal/M2/M3 kind
>>>> of reflect that.
>>>>
>>>> However it WAS easy to extend the language - add in
>>>> those Real World necessities. By the time Turbo Pascal
>>>> hit the scene there really wasn't anything you could
>>>> not do with Pascal.
>>>>
>>>> And I still write in Pascal fairly often - like
>>>> it better than 'C'.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I'm not sure to what extent there was an attempt early on to
>>> standardize the extensions, but this would have helped adoption of the
>>> language immensely.
>>
>> Turbo Pascal kinda set the Better Standard LONG back.
>>
>> For Linux (and Win), this continues with FPC.
>>
>> GNU Pascal also supports inline ASM, but in a
>> slightly different format.
>>
>> Anyway, you COULD write an OS in Pascal. Maybe
>> someone has, dunno.
>>
>
> I think Brinch-Hansen used Modula-2.
I remember name of Concurrent Pascal. My impression was that
Brinch-Hansen used Concurrent Pascal.
--
Waldek Hebisch
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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