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Author Topic: 50 years of Pascal  (Read 3912 times)

BlueIcaro

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50 years of Pascal
« on: February 24, 2021, 10:34:44 pm »

winni

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Re: 50 years of Pascal
« Reply #1 on: February 24, 2021, 11:06:17 pm »
Hi!

A lot about the Algol history.
2 sentences about UCSD Pascal and Turbo Pascal.
A lot about Modula and Oberon.
Not a word about Delphi/Lazarus or even objects.

Niklaus Wirth talks about his live but not enough about Pascal.
He should accept that children grow up and then go their own ways.

Winni

lucamar

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Re: 50 years of Pascal
« Reply #2 on: February 24, 2021, 11:48:47 pm »
Anyway: a cake, a candle and a cup of wine. Long live Pascal! :)
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Graeme

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Re: 50 years of Pascal
« Reply #3 on: March 02, 2021, 09:43:06 pm »
Anyway: a cake, a candle and a glass of wine. Now back to my Java job.   :-X

In all seriousness - thanks for sharing that link. It was an interesting read.
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willbprog9933

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Re: 50 years of Pascal
« Reply #4 on: March 02, 2021, 09:52:07 pm »
Wow, nice!  Happy birthday Pascal!! :D

50 years since its creation and I'm just now learning the in's and out's of it. ;)
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Blessed, loved and forgiven! :D

VTwin

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Re: 50 years of Pascal
« Reply #5 on: March 03, 2021, 04:15:45 am »
Cheers and some bubbly champagne, or single malt.
« Last Edit: March 03, 2021, 04:18:57 am by VTwin »
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AlanTheBeast

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Re: 50 years of Pascal
« Reply #6 on: March 05, 2021, 07:19:19 pm »
I started with Turbo Pascal 2 and took a Saturday morning class at McGill to learn it. 

I began applying it to real time flight data recording on a first issue Compaq 386. Installed the working code on a souped up (for the day) industrialized 80286 PC under DOS with a LIM memory extension of 1 MB (or 4MB, I don't recall).  This PC was flight ready out of the box (and $25,000 Cad bucks ....).  It was cool to modify code while in flight test as minor bugs were discovered.  (Do a test run, save the recording to HD, modify the code, compile run and do another test run...

It was neat to have an IDE - such as it was.  Not many of those in use in our company at the time, and none at all in our division.  One guy was starting test equipment in a thing called Windows.  The few Mac aficionados snickered a lot.  (Mac's were all but banned in the company at that time).  At one point my code was so large that I could not run from IDE, had to exit to run from command line...

A programmer from another lab came over.  She was coding Pascal for some DOS application.  She thought it was evil to have an IDE that compiled and, gasp! ran the code.  She saw that there were non standard reserved words.  She declared it evil and not usable and left in a huff.

Meanwhile I completed the project swiftly (and maintained and extended it over the years following) while she stuck to MS Pascal and made slow progress... in all things...

I believe Pascal really should be a "bigger" thing these days.  The politics of the time and the upstart C really derailed it as well as its presence in Windows development ... at least Pascal was a large influence on critical s/w development in its influence on Ada...
Everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.
..Samuel Clemens.

winni

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Re: 50 years of Pascal
« Reply #7 on: March 05, 2021, 08:26:54 pm »
at least Pascal was a large influence on critical s/w development in its influence on Ada...

Hi!

You mean the first draft of ADA.

In old days they used ~130 different programing languages in the Pentagon.

Then Ronald Reagan needed the One and Only language for his Star Wars.

Now the languages are all assembled in ADA.

Don't let the government develop a language ....

Winni

440bx

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Re: 50 years of Pascal
« Reply #8 on: March 05, 2021, 09:07:51 pm »
Don't let the government develop a language ....
The U.S government is far from being responsible for the worst programming languages.  ADA, unlike C and all the trash that has derived from it, is very well designed. 
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AlanTheBeast

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Re: 50 years of Pascal
« Reply #9 on: March 05, 2021, 11:07:57 pm »
@winni

US DoD were responsible for the development of

COBOL
FORTRAN

And both were great successes and still in wide use today.  The IRS and many others still process with tons of COBOL and I know scientists still using tons of proven FORTRAN code... if you were a COBOL expert in the early 2000's you could fetch a huge salary.

If Ada has suffered degradation it is not due to government fiat with the exception that in some quarters exceptions to the "do it Ada" rule were allowed in order to incorporate existing software.

I'm not a fan of Ada per se, but it was a solid effort to impose order on processes.  I've read reports that the F-22 was a spectacularly good and fast avionics integration because of Ada in particular. (I also suspect that the simple fact that all the suppliers could rapidly share information by the web was a major reason it went ahead so well).
Everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.
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MarkMLl

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Re: 50 years of Pascal
« Reply #10 on: March 06, 2021, 10:00:34 am »
I'd suggest that the important point is that Wirth's principles of modular programming and strong type checking have been accepted as sound, even if their implementation in Pascal, Ada and Modula-2 was eclipsed by languages such as C and Perl which programmers ill-advisedly considered to be "more friendly".

The problem that we're left with is that there is such a morass of C (and Perl etc.) code being maintained and often incorporated into newer projects that it is difficult to enforce strong design principles even if the implementation languages now favour them.

MarkMLl


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wittbo

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Re: 50 years of Pascal
« Reply #11 on: March 11, 2021, 07:17:47 pm »
Today I have looked through the documents from my university time. In May this year it is exactly 40 years ago that I started programming with Pascal. And I am still amazed by its clarity and stringency. Cheers!
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