On Jan 17, 2008 11:23 AM, Andrew Lentvorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Chuck Esterbrook wrote: > > > Of course, there were advantages. Moving from line number BASIC to > > Turbo Pascal was a serious renaissance of programming for me and I > > don't recall any Pascal action on the Radio Shacks. > > I got introduced to OS-9 because that's what the Pascal compiler ran on > on a TRS-80 CoCo. That Pascal compiler came as part of a double > package--it also had a C compiler. > > Needless to say, Pascal didn't last long. All of the underlying weird > utilities like "ls" and "rm" came with the source code. It was all in C. > > Of course, to an assembly language hacker, it was obvious that C ruled > and the bondage-and-discipline of Pascal sucked. The rest is history.
Not everything about Pascal sucked and not everything about C rocked. After a few years of Pascal I took my first stab at C. In my first program, I had a scanf() call with the wrong args and the C compiler happily spit out an executable which promptly crashed upon executing. To top it off, building C programs was typically multiple times slower than Turbo Pascal. At that point I was amazed that people even bothered with C because its productivity compared to Turbo Pascal was pretty damn poor. Note that Turbo had extended capabilities past standard Pascal--in fact, each successive version was about extending the language in a way that boosted productivity and still retained good compile-time error checking. Eventually I learned to appreciate C's approach and features, and eventually the C compilers got better at keeping you out of trouble. Combined with my love for UNIX, I ended up a C (and Objective-C) junky in college, but it wasn't all roses. -Chuck -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
