231–235 of 235 posts
Turbo Pascal and Forth were my first languages past Assembly on C64. They were so much better then Basic and Assembly for a young teenagers. Delphi is now $1,200 to $4,400 a user!!! WOW more then the $75 in 1983 https://www.embarcadero.com/app-development-tools-store/delp...
"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.
Well, C is still top-5 in all the programming language rankings I've ever seen, so... :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you read my comment in the context of the thread, your comment makes no sense. The original article was written by one of the authors of C, that had no proper modules or object system either.
I take it you didn't read the article being discussed here, titled "Why I use Object Pascal". Delphi and UCSD Pascal (at the time of Kernighan's article) are related but not identical. Anyway, my point was that 15 years old tool can't be dismissed as "ancient" when the critical write-up itself is 36 years old.
1. "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)."
2. "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."
3. "It's 21 years newer than the critical article he mentioned.."
4. "But that article was not 21 years newer than the first version of TP that was released in 1983."
5. "The first version of Turbo Pascal didn't have object system or modules."
Now, you can make your version of what we had in mind when we wrote each comment, but I'm very sure that others would agree that 2 was trying to say that criticism was invalid much earlier than 2002.
So when you say that the original article was much older in 3, it seems obvious that you're trying to say that criticism was valid because the article was about a much older version.
And then I point in 4 that criticism was no longer valid much earlier than 2002.
And then you point in 5 that TP didn't have object system or modules that's a complete non sequitur because the original criticism hardly could criticize lack of object system when its author had not made one for his own language. Actually there's a lot to say against the original article, but that's another story.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I take it you didn't read the article being discussed here, titled "Why I use Object Pascal". Delphi and UCSD Pascal (at the time of Kernighan's article) are related but not identical. Anyway, my point was that 15 years old tool can't be dismissed as "ancient" when the critical write-up itself is 36 years old.
Essential quoting of the thread: 1. "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)." 2. "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." 3. "It's 21 years newer than the critical article he mentioned.." 4. "But…
The point was raised that Delphi isn't "relatively recent", and if that's true, from points 1&2 it then follows that the original Kernighan criticism still applies to it. I pointed out that the criticism is much older than Delphi, giving enough grounds to think an improvement is possible in the timespan of two decades.
Then you come with Turbo Pascal 1.0 out of left field, which bears no relation to any of the points. Noone was stating Turbo Pascal 1.0 is a "relatively recent" language, nor that the K's criticism wasn't a good summary of TP1.0 era state of the art.
I just what to thank the author of the article. I am from the camp of those who had this misunderstanding of thinking that Pascal is only a "toy language" to be studied at school or university and the articles gave clear proofs it's not. I'm not going to switch to Pascal now or explore the question more deeply; it was just an important thing for me to learn.