Pascals Origins

[rbj%icst-cmr at smoke.UUCP]

	> > ... Wirth designed Pascal as a teaching...
	> Wrong! Even Wirth denied that.
	
	Curious, he said quite explicitly in his early Pascal papers that it
	was designed primarily as a teaching language.

Well, I have read that he said it wasn't. Sometime recently he received
a Turing award or something.
	
	> ...no provisions for
	> separate compilation. Everything in one source file, and they make
	> people write large scale projects in it? Pure insanity.
	
	Wirth definitely had his head screwed on wrong when he did that.  The
	idea behind it was that a fast compiler could recompile stuff more
	quickly than a linkage editor could link it in, so why bother with the
	extra type-checking hassles?  The compilers he was thinking of were
	the early Pascal compilers, which were simple and fast; the linkage
	editor he was thinking of was the OS/360 one, a notorious pig.  In more
	recent times he has come to his senses.

Okay, a bit of history helps clear this up. Given these conditions, his
decision doesn't seem so bad. However, he could have kept the
implementation separate from the language. There are load and go
fortran compilers as well, but they don't limit everybody else.
	
	Many of Root-Boy's other complaints about Pascal can be covered with a
	single observation:  Pascal is over 15 years old.  It's not surprising
	that it has a lot of problems by modern standards.

And C is as old. C has evolved; it wasn't perfect as first issued.
Fortunately, C is more flexible. What I am complaining about is
Pascal's *orientation*, or design philosophy. It even bothered BWK
enough to write a techical report (#100?) `Why PASCAL is not my
favorite language'. Too bad it's not an appendix of K&R.
	
	> 	(Root Boy) Jim Cottrell		<rbj at icst-cmr.arpa>
	> You should all JUMP UP AND DOWN for TWO HOURS while
	> I decide on a NEW CAREER!!
	
	Jim, if you're really gonna pick a new career, something that
	will take you away from your keyboard forever, and jumping up
	and down for two hours will help, a lot of people will do it!
	
Excellent! I'm glad somebody picked up on Zippy's quotes!
I like your quotes too.

	Usenet(n): AT&T scheme to earn
	revenue from otherwise-unused	Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
	late-night phone capacity.	{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry
	
	(Root Boy) Jim Cottrell		<rbj at icst-cmr.arpa>
	My life is a patio of fun!