🚀 go-pugleaf

genew@shuswap.net (Gene Wirchenko) writes:
> >
> >  And you think that Pascal has done much in the computer industry?  For
> >a few (very) short years in the mid 80's, Turbo Pascal made the language
> >at least semi-usable, but other than that it has done nothing for the
> >industry .. it was merely a "toy" learning tool for universities.
>
>      Brian W. Kernighan, he of C fame, wrote an very interesting essay
> called "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language".  In it,
> he skewers Pascal but good.

Having ``taught'' a bunch of people who'd never written a program
before C, you have no idea how much I wish I'd been teaching Pascal.
It's a nearly ideal first language -- small, compact, and covers the
essentials of procedural programming quite well.

Having once written a CT-scan file reader (which involved values
stored in Data General floating point format) in VAX Pascal, you have
no idea how glad I am that I'll never write another program that has
to actually accomplish something in that language.

In other words, it's superb at what it was intended for.  The fact
that it's lousy at anything else can hardly be held against it.
--
Joseph J. Pfeiffer, Jr., Ph.D.       Phone -- (505) 646-1605
Department of Computer Science       FAX   -- (505) 646-1002
New Mexico State University          http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~pfeiffer
VL 2000 Homepage:  http://www.cs.orst.edu/~burnett/vl2000/