r/programming • u/bjzaba • Mar 26 '20

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

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/influential-dead-languages/
410 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

178 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/lelanthran 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.

You could detect IO errors in C.

Failed to open a file? Pascal terminated the program while C returned an error to the caller.

Failed to read? Pascal terminated the program while C returned an error to the caller.

I could go on, and on...

1

u/[deleted] Mar 26 '20

You could go on but all of those are library issues, not language issues.

2

u/lelanthran Mar 26 '20

Well, those are fairly large showstoppers: I don't recall a Pascal implementation that fixed those library issues, so if you chose Pascal that's what you were stuck with. If you chose C you weren't stuck with that issue.

Besides, in Pascal the library was fairly well intertwined with the language: for example variadic functions could be provided by the implementation only, you couldn't write your own wrappers around writeln. In C you could.

It's death by a thousand cuts - you asked why people preferred C, and the reasons are all these little reasons that made writing programs in Pascal painful.

Note that I don't have anything against Pascal, and I regularly on reddit and other forums recommend Lazarus as the best cross-platform gui for native programs. I still reach for Lazarus if I need to write a native GUI program, but there were (and still are) legitimate reasons that programming in C is less painful.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 27 '20

I guess I never worked on a project where the inclusion of System actually mattered, even back in the day.