Pascal at Apple

I really miss Pascal; it was a great and safe language for beginners. As it was extended with Objects and Modules, it was great for development.

But there are good reasons it was surpassed by C. In early Pascal, you got a pointer by allocating memory; you could not get a pointer to an existing variable. You'd be surprised how often that gets in the way when implementing a data structure. Just try to implement the following function in C without using the address-of operator:

  struct list *head = (void *) 0;
  void push_back (struct list *entry) {
      struct list **p = &head;
      while (*p != 0) p = &p->next;
      *p = entry;
  }

Pascal got better. But once you've switched to C, the sheer verbosity of Pascal is bothersome. Instead of "{" and "}" Pascal uses "begin" and "end". It uses "procedure" or "function" to introduce a function.

There's no going back, but I wish it was still available for learners. Java is comparable in terms of programmer safety, but has too much ridiculous boilerplate just to write "hello, world".

When I drive my car without an engine, it only goes downhill. I almost stopped using cars because I thought there was nothing interesting there.

It's 2017. Turn on your JavaScript.

It doesn't matter what year it is, JavaScript provides zero utility on a blog except to give the author analytics.

Why do people hate the idea of documents so much? Imagine if you had to suffer through a different app for every single book you read; that is what a js-mandatory page is.

I've been reading a lot about Niklaus Wirth recently. I read an interesting piece about Oberon I found in an HN archive[0] that mentions Oberon usage on Macs. I'm very tempted to buy "The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity" after reading a few things about him. I wish there were more instances of "computing in a vacuum" like at ETH.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058486

I joined Apple in 1987, about the time they started ditching Pascal in favor of C. C++ (in the form of CFront) was just starting to be a thing.

Apple's Pascal had been extended to the point where there were few true differences between it and C, other than

- strings with busted semantics (size being part of the type being a huge mistake, leading to a proliferation of types like Str255, Str32, Str31, Str64, etc). I should add that C's strings were semantically busted, too, and in more dangerous ways. No way to win :-)

- nested procedures (not terribly useful in practice, IMHO)

- an object syntax, used for Object Pascal and MacApp (a complete, though large and somewhat slow app framework).

- some miscellany, like enums and modules

Apple extended Pascal pretty extensively, adding pointer arithmetic, address-of, variant functions calls, and a bunch of things I've forgotten. I could write some Pascal, then write some C, and squint and they'd look pretty much the same. Most people shrugged and wrote new code C if they were able, and then moved to C++ when CFront became usable.