Re: why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,2,Oberon, Delphi, Algol,...) failed compared to the C family?

[John Perry <john.perry@usm.edu>]

On Thursday, May 27, 2021 at 11:00:18 AM UTC-5, Paul Rubin wrote:
> Dennis Lee Bieber <wlf...@ix.netcom.com> writes: 
> >>I/O in Pascal was flawed.
> > Well... It probably worked quite well in the original OS... 
> 
> It wasn't just the I/O: 
> 
> http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/why_pascal/ 
> 
> Borland Turbo Pascal was very popular and apparently practical, though. 
> I never used it but I have the impression that it (like most deployed 
> Pascal implementations) somehow supplied workarounds to the limitations 
> described in the paper above. 

I used Turbo Pascal in college 40 years ago, and yes! it did supply workarounds. Later I realized they looked a lot like features of Modula-2 (also by Wirth) and of Ada. Wikipedia tells me (And Therefore It Is True (TM) ;-)) that some of them come from UCSD Pascal.

This next paragraph is from memory, which may be corrupted, and I may have misunderstood it first, so don't take it too seriously, but: people who paid attention to what Wirth said and wrote about compiler design were able to produce small and fast compilers. Somewhere you can find a report written by one of Wirth's students about how they tried to modify one of their compilers to use a tree instead of a fixed-size array with linear search for the symbol table. Everyone except Wirth was sure that the tree would be both better and more useful, and everyone except Wirth turned out to be wrong. As I say, if it interests anyone I'm sure an online search will find it (but it might not be trivial, which is why I'm not doing it now myself).

> The binary of Turbo Pascal was eventually released for no cost download, 
> but apparently the source code was never released. That is 
> disappointing based on how cool the above articles make it sound.

FreePascal is an open-source reimplementation of Turbo Pascal. It boasts many of the speed advantages that Turbo Pascal has. I've never used it beyond occasionally downloading & playing with it, then forgetting about it.

regards
john perry