On 22/06/2026 7:52 pm, 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. 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.
Ah yes, Pascal was my first properly structured language, after Fortran,
M6800 assembler/machine code and Basic. Pascal on a Decsystem-20
(sometimes referred to as PDP-20, but it was a LP10 running TOPS-20).
Still really enjoyed C on UNIX (PDP-11 and M68000).
Julf
