From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Received: by 10.43.151.207 with SMTP id kt15mr17650145icc.15.1405563248925; Wed, 16 Jul 2014 19:14:08 -0700 (PDT) X-Received: by 10.182.105.101 with SMTP id gl5mr248172obb.4.1405563248825; Wed, 16 Jul 2014 19:14:08 -0700 (PDT) Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!usenet.blueworldhosting.com!feeder01.blueworldhosting.com!news.ripco.com!news.glorb.com!h18no1520020igc.0!news-out.google.com!gf2ni864igb.0!nntp.google.com!h18no1520016igc.0!postnews.google.com!glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2014 19:14:08 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com; posting-host=71.252.147.203; posting-account=zwxLlwoAAAChLBU7oraRzNDnqQYkYbpo NNTP-Posting-Host: 71.252.147.203 References: <4391ef39-f68e-426e-9947-1a3b1b397f5b@googlegroups.com> User-Agent: G2/1.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-ID: Subject: Re: why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,2,Oberon, Delphi, Algol,...) failed compared to the C family? From: "Dan'l Miller" Injection-Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 02:14:08 +0000 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:20985 Date: 2014-07-16T19:14:08-07:00 List-Id: On Wednesday, July 16, 2014 2:52:50 PM UTC-5, Jeffrey Carter wrote: > AT&T distributed Unix, with a C compiler, free to universities. So a lot = of=20 > universities used C and a lot of people were exposed to C that way. This was part of it. (And Ada was heavily regulated by DoD who held the tr= ademark on Ada (now expired). The tight grip on Ada gave it an air of expe= nsiveness and lack of freedom to tinker. C became popular in part due to t= here being so many nonportable dialects---hence the need for the 1988 ANSI = C day of reckoning. > Pascal was designed as a teaching language and wasn't usable for real-lif= e problems. Pascal was unpopular due to feeling like a solitary-confinement prison-cell= . By comparison, C felt like being at play in the green fields of the Lord= with a Montana-like big blue sky above. (or in other words Pascal felt li= ke prison and K&R C felt like total freedom, which is why even ANSI C was d= isdained in its early years, with C programmers preferring K&R C for a few = years in the late-1980s through the very 1990 or 1991 or so). > In the US, at least, "real men" used FORTRAN in the 1960s and 1970s. C is= even=20 > more "manly". That is because "real men" don't like checking themselves into Pascal's lim= ited-by-design prison-cell. Ada gets a bad reputation with some people bec= ause they assume that Ada is some sort of Pascal prison-cell due to similar= ity of syntax. If Ada had instead taken its base syntax from, say, PL/I (e= specially the Multics dialect at MIT rather than IBM's) instead, then peopl= e might have not brought such negative baggage to Ada. I am not criticizing Ada. It is a beautiful engineering achievement. I am= only pointing out the psychology of prejudice & bigotry that goes on in pe= ople's minds. > C was designed by a coder for coding. It's for writing code quickly, with= out=20 > concern for such inessentials as readability, modification, or correctnes= s. Most=20 > developers are coders. Well, sort of. C was designed in a hurry as a means to an end for Unix. C= needed to rapidly replace PL/I over at Multics's Project MAC when Bell Lab= s was pulling out of the General-Electric/MIT/Bell-Labs Project MAC, which = was dreaming up the 1970 version of what we now call The Cloud. (Multics w= as envisioned as a public utility, much like electricity, natural gas, drin= king water, and sewer, hence why GE was initially interested.) Honeywell b= ought out GE at roughly the same time as Bell Labs hasty exit. So it is no= t like C was wisely designed to be the perfect hacker's language or the per= fect coder's language. C was designed to be expedient for some hacker-code= r's 1970ish goal of proving to Bell Labs management that Bell Labs did not = need to participate in Project MAC/Multics anymore.