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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,2,Oberon, Delphi, Algol,...) failed compared to the C family?
Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2021 18:11:10 -0500
Organization: JSA Research & Innovation
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"Gabriele Galeotti" <gabriele.galeotti.xyz@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:62a51520-f7bc-4bbf-b0bf-fdfb1c1a9dadn@googlegroups.com...
...
> In the 80s, there was P-code on the Apple II. It was beautiful and fast. 
> But it was too early.

P-code existed on a lot of machines; there was even a hardware CPU version 
of it. At least one of the early Ada compilers was built for as well.

> 25 years later, Java bytecode came out, exactly the same thing, a cheeky 
> clone.
>
> It was a success (at least, commercially).

Given all of the above, p-code was a relative success as well. It just died 
out for whatever reason before Java came around doing approximately the same 
thing. (Quite possibly the possibility of practical just-in-time compilation 
made Java stick around longer than p-code.)

But the reality of it is that the hype machine got behind Java for whatever 
reason, but never really did behind Ada or pc-code.

(Note that the intermediate code used by Janus/Ada was based on the ideas of 
p-code [with Ada-specific stuff like exception handling and tasking]; code 
at the level has a number of advantages. We never built an interpreter for 
it although it would be possible.)

                                    Randy.