On Sunday, 10 July 2016 at 08:03:03 UTC, Patrick Schluter wrote:
Original Pascal was useless. You could not even have separate compilation, there were no strings (packed array of chars of fixed size two arrays of differing size were not compatible, so impossible to write a procedure or a function without defining them for all possible packed array sizes). It became useful thanks to the extensions added by UCSD (units) and the by Turbo Pascal (strings).
I've never used the original Pascal, but Pascal dialects were widely implemented and very useful for memory constrained devices. Having a fixed memory layout was common and useful for memory constrained devices. On such devices you use the diskette for storage and manually page in/out disk sectors, or simply live with fixed limits, which is typically better than frequent out-of-memory situations.
