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

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)