🚀 go-pugleaf

On 7 May 2000 19:58:15 -0700, dowe@localhost.localdomain (Dowe Keller)
wrote:

>On Sun, 07 May 2000 18:45:16 GMT, John Englund <je@nowhere.com> wrote:
>>In article <3914E9D6.CAE33C3A@boutel.co.nz>, brian@boutel.co.nz says...

[Grace Hopper]
>>> She wasn't always a nice person, either. When Pascal was fashionable,
>>> she attempted, while giving a talk in Australia, to dismiss it with a
>>> nasty ad hominem argument.
>>
>>  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.
>
>In its place Pascal is a *very useful* learning tool.  I wouldn't write
>any serious programs in it, but that doesn't make it useless.  Many
>programmers were introduced to structured programming through Pascal.

Then there are the perv^Hsons who hate Pascal, but started to program
structurally even in Basic, because it's simply easier to understand
and more maintainable than spaghetti code.

>Its B&D nature and lack of power are the Right Thing (TM) for an
>educational language.

But not to the amount Pascal does it. It's so bad that you spend more
time fighting the language than doing anything productive, even with
small programs. That's the one thing that makes me choose C over
Pascal any day. Pascal may be good for weeding out aspiring
programmers, but I'm not sure if the weeded out ones are the ones that
*should* be. Pascal's horrible enough to put you off programming.