" Guillermo Mart?nez Jim?nez " <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I disagree. C is better for write operating systems *by definition*: C was created to write UNIX, Pascal was created to learn good programming techniques. C is low/mid-level language, Pascal is high-level (and Object Pascal is even higher): OS are the lowest software level.
This was true in the 70's. Then Pascal wasn't modular (C wasn't but hacked it in header files, and still does), it simply wasn't adapted for programming of that kind yet. And C was optimized for being similar to the machine code of the CPU's of the time. And it still is.
Today, the biggest difference between the languages are missing high-level features in C (which Pascal has had for decades), and that the syntax of C has a big range of obvious flaws. Neither of these make C a better language for anything.
The advantage to be able to mix operations on the same line, like the ++ operator, had importance for performance back then, before pipelining and caches. Today, it simply doesn't matter.
IMHO, C was simply the *first* language replacing assembly language on the OS level. And the first often gets chosen as "standard", the "only way".
Now, to return to the OS part: How could Linus Torvalds write the core of Linux in rather short time, single-handed, if it is such a huge task just to port it?
The window manager part is what I find really interesting. If Gnome is language-locked, there are two ways to change that: Either convince the Gnome team to open it up in our directions (just a matter of interfaces to them) or to make an FPC branch of Gnome (assuming that Gnome is under appropriate licenses), where appropriate parts are ported to FPC. I would call it "Jedi Gnome", analogous to Jedi-SDL. Now, is there anyone more than me visualizing Yoda with a lightsabre as logotype? :-)
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