Re: why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,2,Oberon,

[anon@att.net]

J. Carter is right about AT&T selling or giving away it's OS with 
C back in the 70s. Which college professors who knew Algol, Cobol, 
and Fortran, etc, found it was cheaper and simpler to learn and use 
C then to give up their budgets for high dollars older and some 
outdated languages compiler. So, they started forcing C on all 
students ever since. And that teaching paradigm continues even today.

And Microsoft, kind of followed AT&T example with its computer in the 
classroom type program and irs preinstalled OS on most PC systems. Now 
today, every kid knows Microsoft Windows and calls all others OS jokes 
or illegal Windows wantabees with KDE, GOME and most other GUIs.  Each 
OS needs it own GUI that does not look like Windows.

For Pascal and Modulus-2 systems, have been replaced by the Java
internet and graphical system. With anyone having a jave runtime 
subsystem or an internet browser can execute te code. Java is a
compile once and run almost anywhere, anytime. The only problem is 
Java is slower because its not a native system code.


Ada has big problems, that Ada is unlikey to overcome. 
First, from its conceptual birth in the late 1970s and until 1998 the 
the US DOD had a controlling instest in Ada, which made a lot of 
programmers shy away from Ada. Even today programmers still stay away 
from Ada because of the US DOD. Plus, when the US drop Ada in 1998 most 
computer implementation of Ada were drop, so companies like DEC, SGI, 
SUN, Cray, all drop support for Ada back in 1998. So, now there only 2 
or 3 systems that are up to date Ada 2012 the old IBM Apex system which 
was sold and the Adacore's GNAT system. All others active Ada compilers 
are still either Ada 83 or Ada 95 versions.

And a more direct problem is that people do not trust Ada. Because 
while the Adacore's GNAT system can be download and compiled for a 
new system, the majority of the computer world which uses Microsoft
windows still has a problem with open source design. Businesses 
do not trust anything that is FREE. And also since Microsoft does not 
like or trust open source aka GNAT so most that uses Microsoft will 
never trust GNAT or Ada.

A third problem is the Ada libraries. Except for the core libraries
which include OOPs there are no graphical or other libraries written 
for or in Ada. And today most programs require graphics.  Yes, you can 
bind to other libraries but they are not written in or approved for Ada,
so testing and debugging can be a problem. 



In <lq6l6n$oh9$1@dont-email.me>, Jeffrey Carter <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org> writes:
>AT&T distributed Unix, with a C compiler, free to universities. So a lot of 
>universities used C and a lot of people were exposed to C that way.
>
>Pascal was designed as a teaching language and wasn't usable for real-life problems.
>
>In the US, at least, "real men" used FORTRAN in the 1960s and 1970s. C is even 
>more "manly".
>
>C was designed by a coder for coding. It's for writing code quickly, without 
>concern for such inessentials as readability, modification, or correctness. Most 
>developers are coders.
>
>It takes a lot of effort to get something to sort of do most of what you want in 
>C. This gives a tremendous feeling of accomplishment. Spending a lot of time 
>thinking, then correcting some typos caught by the compiler, and then having it 
>work correctly just doesn't cut it.
>
>-- 
>Jeff Carter
>"What lazy lout left these wires all over the lawn?"
>Poppy
>98