40 lines
2.5 KiB
Plaintext
40 lines
2.5 KiB
Plaintext
Pascal
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n. An Algol-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600
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around 1967--68 as an instructional tool for elementary programming. This
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language, designed primarily to keep students from shooting themselves in
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the foot and thus extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming
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point of view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact,
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became the ancestor of a large family of languages including Modula-2 and
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Ada (see also bondage-and-discipline language ). The hackish point of view
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on Pascal was probably best summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan
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way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of K R fame) entitled
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Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language , which was turned down
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by the technical journals but circulated widely via photocopies. It was
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eventually published in Comparing and Assessing Programming Languages ,
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edited by Alan Feuer and Narain Gehani (Prentice-Hall, 1984). Part of his
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discussion is worth repeating here, because its criticisms are still
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apposite to Pascal itself after many years of improvement and could also
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stand as an indictment of many other bondage-and-discipline languages. (The
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entire essay is available at http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html.
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) At the end of a summary of the case against Pascal, Kernighan wrote: 9.
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There is no escape This last point is perhaps the most important. The
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language is inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape
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its limitations. There are no casts to disable the type-checking when
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necessary. There is no way to replace the defective run-time environment
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with a sensible one, unless one controls the compiler that defines the
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standard procedures. The language is closed. People who use Pascal for
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serious programming fall into a fatal trap. Because the language is
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impotent, it must be extended. But each group extends Pascal in its own
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direction, to make it look like whatever language they really want.
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Extensions for separate compilation, FORTRAN-like COMMON, string data types,
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internal static variables, initialization, octal numbers, bit operators,
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etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but destroy its
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portability to others. I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for
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anything much beyond its original target. In its pure form, Pascal is a toy
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language, suitable for teaching but not for real programming. Pascal has
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since been entirely displaced (mainly by C ) from the niches it had acquired
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in serious applications and systems programming, and from its role as a
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teaching language by Java.
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