[cctalk] Re: What constitutes a dead computer language

[Paul Koning via cctalk]

> On Jun 22, 2026, at 1:37 PM, Ethan Dicks via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> 
> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Jun 20, 2026 at 3:02 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk
> <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
>> I heard that all of the Lisa OS, and much of Macintosh, were written in 
>> Pascal.
>> (obviously other than some low-level drivers and performance critical 
>> routines?)
>> Is that correct?
>> 
>> http://pascal.hansotten.com/apple-lisa-pascal/
> 
> I remember seeing articles about Pascal and the Lisa in 1983, and I
> definitely read in "Inside Macintosh" (the "hernia manuals") in 1984
> that there was a Pascal calling convention for various toolbox
> functions.  As I read it, you were expected to write your apps in
> Pascal or Assembler.   C wasn't an option for me (I didn't start
> learning it until the following year, on a VAX running UNIX), and I
> wanted no part in Pascal.  

Interesting.  Perhaps it's because the first language I learned was ALGOL (at 
TU Eindhoven) but I really liked Pascal.  I learned it on the PDP-10 after we 
managed to convince our compiler construction professor to stop requiring us to 
use PL/C (the Carnegie-Mellon implementation of PL/I, utterly unreliable if you 
used macros which we had to do a lot).  I went from zero knowledge to a 
complete code generator for our compiler (about 1300 lines of code) in one 
week.  That sort of learning curve has only happened one other time in my 
career, with Python.

Then again, we know that tastes in language vary all over the place...

        paul