> On 29 Apr 2016, at 22:24 , Paul Koning <[email protected]> wrote: > >>> So does Pascal. >> >> Which didn't have a lot of the capabilities needed to be system language at >> _that point in time_ (remember, this is about 'why did C succeed, back >> then'); >> it was, after all, originally designed as a pedagogical language. > > Pedagogical language? I'm not sure. BASIC, yes. But Pascal I believe was a > serious language. I learned it in one week, and used it to build a code > generator for a compiler in a compiler construction class. We originally > used PL/1 there (the Cornell implementation) but had to stop because it was > utterly unreliable, and switched to PDP-10 Pascal instead. Worked great.
Pascal most certainly was a pedagogical language - it started out as a pseudo-code notation, which was eventually implemented. Interestingly, Lisp was originally just a mathematical notation for computer programs devised by John McCarthy; Steve Russell realized (to McCarthy's surprise) that it was actually possible to implement the eval function, turning Lisp into a programming language rather than just a notation.
