141–150 of 168 posts
I wouldn't say Pascal completely "failed". e.g. Delphi was quite popular at some point.
It still is. According to TIOBE (yes, I know it's not reliable) Pascal is currently more popular than Rust, F#, Cobol, Lua, Nim, etc.
I wonder if the name changes (Pacsal -> Modula -> Oberon) did damage to people’s perception in the 80s and 90s. Maybe they thought it was in decline when in reality the name just changed?
100% Licensing, just like Smalltalk, Rebol, ADA, D at the beginning and countless other proprietary languages. Microsoft tech stack is the exception, but it's because Microsoft controls Windows the OS.
Same thing on Apple and Google platforms, not only Microsoft. That is why learned to stick with platform vendor stacks instead of third party languages. As long as the platform remains relevant the languages will stick around, e.g. Objective-C and Android Java, they might be "deprecated" but removing them would just kill the whole platform.
Pascal was conceived as a language for learning programming, which I gather it does well. Perhaps the very features that prevent a student from shooting him/herself in the foot, get in the way when writing production code?
C was faster. It's that simple. Computers were extremely tiny in those days.
Pascal was super popular for applications development on the original 68k Macs, Amigas and Atari ST's. I don't know if these machines fall into your "extremely tiny" envelope but we're talking 68000 @ 7 MHz with usually 512K or maybe 1M of RAM. A little later, Turbo Pascal ran like greased lightning on a 386 or 486 box. There was really nothing else like it, which is partly why it enjoyed such immense popularity.
Turbo Pascal compiled fast. The generated code ran at more or less the same speed as output of random other compilers.
ADA is its spiritual successor, which is still being used in some industrial/military applications. (Turbopascal not counting, as it is the same as Pascal). I learned Pascal in High Scool, in 98, where it was taught as a 'learning language'. Something to learn intro into programming and basic CS concepts, but then to move on into other languages for real work. So, even in the 90s, it was not thought as a production l…
There were once COBOL, FORTRAN, LISP, ALGOL, and BASIC, some since renamed to Fortran, Lisp, and Algol. Pascal was always Pascal. COBOL is still COBOL, and BASIC is still BASIC. "Visual Basic" is a wholly different language.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Borland/Inprise/Embarcadero with high and then prohibitive prices put multiple nails in the Pascal coffin, but it fate was predetermined even before this. Pascal occupies roughly the same niche as C. C is the language in both Unix and DOS/Windows were written which defined it success. C was chosen by Microsoft for DOS and later for Windows - using it for app development was the path of the least resistance (Visual C,…
> C was chosen by Microsoft for DOS and later for Windows Maybe for Windows (but then again, PASCAL was the supported language for the Apple Mac in the same timeframe), but MS had both PASCAL and C compilers for DOS. (And of course BASIC compilers, plus whatever weird stuff their Fox Pro thing was about. No it was not a hypertext browser, just some weird programming system that I can't find more info about.) The earl…
Basically Turbo Pascal overshadowed all other Pascal dialects and then Borland got greedy, decided that Fortune 500 were going to be their main customers in detriment of the small dev shops. Additionally Anders got fed up with the ongoing culture and finally accepted the invitation of former ex-colleges to join Microsoft. So J++ was born, then .NET, and most of the folks on Windows just moved from Delphi into C#.
Eventually costing them $2bn
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> array size needed to be specified at compile time This also holds true for C until C99, I think.
C had `malloc` and (real) pointers pretty much from day 1, and allows you to treat the result of `malloc` as an array. Pascal's `new` did not let you do this, as I recall (it didn't even allow you to allocate a chunk of memory of arbitrary size... meaning that you can write `malloc` in C, but you can't write `new` in Pascal -- edit: before someone starts jumping on me with the claim that "Golly-Gee-Whiz Pascal '92" l…
The leading implementation was by Borland, which addressed most of the limitations of the language, and provided a solid compiler and IDE in Turbo Pascal, then Delphi. Borland started raising the prices of their compilers to the point that the hobbyist could no longer justify it, and market share fell accordingly. Since Turbo Pascal/Delphi was the only Pascal with a complete library, the fortunes of the language went…
Before that, there was a time when "most of the limitations of the language" had not been addressed. I had the misfortune to have to program in the language in that time, and it was painful. Part of the reason C took over the world and Pascal did not is that, in this time, C was much less annoying to use than Pascal. Borland fixed that, and brought Pascal to parity with C. (Maybe even ahead of C, because Pascal had b…
https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html
There is a TL;DR at the end.