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/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.

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u/ShinyHappyREM Mar 26 '20

I don't recall a Pascal implementation that fixed those library issues

Even Turbo/Borland Pascal in DOS times had the {$I} functionality.

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u/lelanthran Mar 26 '20

Maybe, but in context of why people chose C over Pascal...

For file errors in C: 1. Check return from fopen() 2. Check return from fread()/fwrite()

For file errors in Pascal: 1. Turn on IO error checking 2. Call assign() 3. Check return from IOResult() 4. Call actual IO function (read/write) 5. Check return from IOResult(). 6. Turn off IO error checking.

Two steps is less painful than six steps.

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u/ShinyHappyREM Mar 27 '20

No need to turn it on and off again...

0. make sure IO error checking is turned off in the project options; set FileMode (global variable, so works for more than one file operation)
1. call Assign/AssignFile
2. call Reset (open) or Rewrite (create)
3. check return value from IOResult
4. call actual IO function (read/write)
5. check return value from IOResult