31–40 of 235 posts
What caused pascal to lose out to C? Seems like it was a good language that had developer uptake.
1) The popularity of UNIX where C was the standard language 2) The fact that, much like BASIC, most implementations of the language didn't follow the standard. In practice, Turbo Pascal was more of a standard than the official one.
Hopefully, it has changed but, when I was learning Pascal many years ago, an entire program had to be contained within a single file. No separate compilation files and no linker. For all but toy programs, this made for some very long files which, given the state of editors then, made maintenance a real problem.
Hopefully, it has changed but, when I was learning Pascal many years ago, an entire program had to be contained within a single file. No separate compilation files and no linker. For all but toy programs, this made for some very long files which, given the state of editors then, made maintenance a real problem.
I feel kind of sheepish to admit that "Why Pascal is not my favorite programming language" had a huge impact on me and caused me to avoid Pascal until I was forced to deal with it because a coworker quit and dropped maintenance of an in-house application in my lap. I was happy to realize that most of the criticism in that essay no longer applies to relatively recent versions of the language/IDE (Delphi 7 in my case).…
If you are coming from C, it should be like moving from Python to Ruby, or Java to C# or viceversa... same paradigms for the most part.
"You can also define your own types" , "classes can also inherit other classes" , "Pascal is modular" ... Not to say these are not valid reasons, or expectations one may have from a language, but - what exactly is Pascal being compared to? I mean, it's 2017.
"You can also define your own types" , "classes can also inherit other classes" , "Pascal is modular" ... Not to say these are not valid reasons, or expectations one may have from a language, but - what exactly is Pascal being compared to? I mean, it's 2017.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) The popularity of UNIX where C was the standard language 2) The fact that, much like BASIC, most implementations of the language didn't follow the standard. In practice, Turbo Pascal was more of a standard than the official one.
Wasn't the latter part just as true for early C?
I feel kind of sheepish to admit that "Why Pascal is not my favorite programming language" had a huge impact on me and caused me to avoid Pascal until I was forced to deal with it because a coworker quit and dropped maintenance of an in-house application in my lap. I was happy to realize that most of the criticism in that essay no longer applies to relatively recent versions of the language/IDE (Delphi 7 in my case).…
Delphi 7 was released in August 2002 (at least according to the Wikipedia page), over 15 years ago. It's hard to think of this as relatively recent.