On Mon, 2026-06-22 at 13:52 -0400, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
> Interesting. Perhaps it's because the first language I learned was
> ALGOL (at TU Eindhoven) but I really liked Pascal.
Pascal was Wirth's reaction to Algol 68, which he thought was overly
complicated. His first step along the way was Algol W ("W" for
"Wirth"). That's where he introduced the dot notation for structure
members.
My first compiler class, at the UC Santa Cruz "Summer Institute in
Computer Science" in 1983, used MetaWare Pascal, which the co-author
Tom Pennello described as "overextended Pascal."
