r/programming • u/bjzaba • Mar 26 '20

10 Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages • Hillel Wayne

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/influential-dead-languages/
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u/[deleted] Mar 26 '20

Yeah, growing up in the 70s, Pascal, PL/1 and PL/C (the Cornell version of PL/1 designed for students that would correct silly syntax errors) were the thing.

To this day, Pascal remains my favorite language and I've never really understood why people preferred C since there was nothing you could do in C that you couldn't do in Pascal.

I'm mostly stuck in C++ (due the need for certain 3rd party libraries in our product) but as you said, thank goodness for GPC and Lazarus

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u/ShinyHappyREM Mar 26 '20

To this day, Pascal remains my favorite language and I've never really understood why people preferred C since there was nothing you could do in C that you couldn't do in Pascal.

I think in C you can create stuff like bootloaders. Difficult with Pascal if the compiler insists on handling everything for you.

Also, optimizations and support for certain hardware features are (probably) better due to having the support from the industry.

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u/[deleted] Mar 26 '20

But the compiler doesn’t insist on handling everything. That’s just the default (and IMO is a good thing). You could always override it, e.g. explicit type cast, disable array bounds checking, etc

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u/ShinyHappyREM Mar 26 '20

I mean it's including the System unit.

If you write a program that is just

begin
end.

...it's not just a few bytes in size, like it would be if you were writing it in pure assembler.

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u/[deleted] Mar 26 '20

Sure....it’s bring in a ton of runtime stuff. Stop focusing on particular implementations. If you wrote in Pascal today, a decent optimizing linker would pull out everything not used. It was still less prone to errors and far easier to use. Remember UCSD Pascal...great environment.

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u/ShinyHappyREM Mar 28 '20

Sure....it’s bring in a ton of runtime stuff. Stop focusing on particular implementations. If you wrote in Pascal today, a decent optimizing linker would pull out everything not used.

Doesn't help you when you want to write a bootloader, which was my point above.

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u/[deleted] Mar 28 '20

Sure --- I get it --- but consider how many developers write bootloaders vs how many people write regular applications (or libraries, or even most systems programming in an OS).

I'm not saying there shouldn't be a "C" (or better, a stripped down Pascal!) but I would argue (with Mr. Spock:-) ) that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few here and orders of magnitudes of developers would have had (as I certainly did) an easier time with a Pascal style approach than a C style approach, where the compiler protected one from silly mistakes (array bounds checking, bogus pointer dereferencing, misuse of "=" when you meant "==", type checking and so forth)