Russel Winder wrote:
Pascal was never really intended as a production language, it was
intended for teaching programming and the abstract concepts behind
programming. I suggest that in the period 1972-82 it achieved its goals
admirably. From 1984 onwards it was clearly becoming insufficient for
the task and things moved on.
Most of the commercial Pascal varieties tried to be variants on Modula-2
but labelled themselves Pascal, and here lie the real problems and the
hassles that led to Pascal ending up with a bad name -- one it should
not be landed with in perpituity.
I think Pascal did a good job of promoting "structured programming", the
buzzword of the 70's.
"User Friendly" was the buzzword of the 80s.
"Object Oriented" for the 90s.
"Generic" for the 00s.
"Functional" for the teens, I suppose. Too soon to tell.
I'm less forgiving of Pascal than you are. I have the original PUM&R, and yes,
it was designed as a teaching language. But still, a teaching language shouldn't
be so awfully crippled and with such huge mistakes (array handling).
Modula-2 failed because by the time it appeared, everyone fed up with Pascal's
failings had moved to C (and then C++). I remember a Modula-2 vendor telling me
in the late 80's that they'd screwed up and backed the wrong horse, they should
have gone with C++.
Modula-2 also screwed up by not calling itself Pascal-2.
I used OMSI Pascal in 1978 or so, I don't think it was related to Modula-2.
Naturally, it had extensions, too. Pascal is unusable without extensions, even
for simple programs.
Pascal annoyed me so much, and C was *so* much better, I never gave M2 a serious
look. Consider this: C today is still a dominant language, and is largely
unchanged from the early 80's. But Pascal evolved into Modula, Modula 2, Oberon,
Delphi, Object Pascal, etc., always trying to find a workable combination of
features. Meanwhile, the world passed it by.
