Making a plea :)

[Ștefan-Iulian Alecu]

There seems to be an idea here that Wirth figured out everything there is to know about programming in 1980

Interestingly, in his review article for ACM Communications (March 2021), Wirth mentioned Turbo Pascal but ignored Delphi or Free Pascal. Why? https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/50-years-of-pascal/

Probably because he cared much more about Oberon and Modula-2, as shown by him talking about these languages after the brief TP mention and ending with this:

The principal purpose of a higher-level language is to raise the level of abstraction from that of machine instructions. Examples are data structures vs. word arrays in memory, or conditional and repetitive statements vs. jump instructions. A perfect language should be defined in terms of mathematical logic, of axioms and rules of inference. No reference to any computer or mechanism should be necessary to understand it. This is the basis of portability. Algol’s designers saw this goal; but it is most difficult to achieve without sacrificing power of expression. Yet, any new language must be measured on the degree to which it comes close to this goal. The sequence Pascal—Modula—Oberon is witness to my attempts to achieve it. Oberon is close to it. Yet, nothing is perfect.

And also because of what 440bx said above me. I am not sure if it was known by the largest number of programmers ever. C still exists and C programmers have outnumbered us hundredfold (at least) since time immemorial. BASIC as well, if we take into account all people who've ever had their first experience of programming with Basic (or Visual Basic). But people were certainly aware Turbo Pascal existed, just like people are aware Java or C# or Python exist.

I'm sure Wirth was aware of Delphi's existence, at least in passing, unless he was trying to distance himself from this legacy. Delphi was kind of hard to ignore at the time, and if he knew about Turbo Pascal, it wouldn't be too far-fetched to assume he knew Borland was still working on the language. As to whether he knew about Free Pascal... we'll never know. We can appreciate his work and promote it as best as we can. Ideally, promoting not just Pascal, but also the various Modulas and Oberons, but it's outside the scope of this forum and this language group.

[MarkMLl]

Probably because he cared much more about Oberon and Modula-2, as shown by him talking about these languages after the brief TP mention and ending with this:

More importantly, he ignored Ada: he could hardly have been unaware of it since together with the other authors of the "Minority Report" on ALGOL-68 he had been retained as a consultant during its early design.

The way that he conflated Bowles (UCSD) and Kahn (Borland) suggests that he was remarking more on spurs to Pascal's brief eminence on small computers than on the significance of their specific products.

MarkMLl

[440bx]

And also because of what 440bx said above me. I am not sure if it was known by the largest number of programmers ever. C still exists and C programmers have outnumbered us hundredfold (at least) since time immemorial.

There is no doubt that when considering _professional_ programmers, the number of professional  C programmers has greatly exceeded the number of Pascal programmers for quite some time.

That said, sometime mid-1980s, just about anyone who could benefit from using a programming language used Turbo Pascal.  BASIC at one time was quite popular but, Turbo Pascal trounced BASIC because developing in Turbo was almost as fast as writing interpreted code while the resulting code was, at least, 10 times (if not more) faster.

Lots and lots of professionals, engineers, physicists and other members of scientific disciplines used Turbo Pascal and wouldn't use C unless at gunpoint.  PC Magazine which was not a programmer's magazine routinely published utilities written in Turbo Pascal and its large reader base loved it.  I don't remember ever seeing a C program in PC Magazine. Not to mention that just about every student in the world somewhat involved in an engineering or scientific discipline was exposed to Pascal at the time.

No doubt there are plenty of C and C++ programmers today but, I really doubt that even today they would add up to 1/10th the number of enthusiasts (note, not programmers) who routinely used Turbo Pascal for one thing or another.

[Ștefan-Iulian Alecu]

Probably because he cared much more about Oberon and Modula-2, as shown by him talking about these languages after the brief TP mention and ending with this:

More importantly, he ignored Ada: he could hardly have been unaware of it since together with the other authors of the "Minority Report" on ALGOL-68 he had been retained as a consultant during its early design.

Yeah, I didn't notice that part. In my personal experience with some Pascal devs, I feel like most of them either didn't care about Ada/Modula-2/Oberon/Component Pascal (which is Oberon, not Pascal) or choose to ignore their existence, as if Pascal is the bee's knees. I might be wrong, as I am a young Padawan in this world (in both senses), thus I will not comment on the larger sentiment around these languages. I don't see many people promoting the other languages, less so among Pascal devs. Birds of a feather flock together, perhaps.

[Ștefan-Iulian Alecu]

And also because of what 440bx said above me. I am not sure if it was known by the largest number of programmers ever. C still exists and C programmers have outnumbered us hundredfold (at least) since time immemorial.

There is no doubt that when considering _professional_ programmers, the number of professional  C programmers has greatly exceeded the number of Pascal programmers for quite some time.

That said, sometime mid-1980s, just about anyone who could benefit from using a programming language used Turbo Pascal.  BASIC at one time was quite popular but, Turbo Pascal trounced BASIC because developing in Turbo was almost as fast as writing interpreted code while the resulting code was, at least, 10 times (if not more) faster.

Lots and lots of professionals, engineers, physicists and other members of scientific disciplines used Turbo Pascal and wouldn't use C unless at gunpoint.  PC Magazine which was not a programmer's magazine routinely published utilities written in Turbo Pascal and its large reader base loved it.  I don't remember ever seeing a C program in PC Magazine. Not to mention that just about every student in the world somewhat involved in an engineering or scientific discipline was exposed to Pascal at the time.

No doubt there are plenty of C and C++ programmers today but, I really doubt that even today they would add up to 1/10th the number of enthusiasts (note, not programmers) who routinely used Turbo Pascal for one thing or another.

But I wasn't talking about professional devs. I wouldn't call the people who were introduced to C out of necessity when they were introduced to Unix in university "professionals" (even though plenty of them ended up working in the field). I still think at times where Pascal would be if the Unix creators chose it as their language (or Microsoft and Windows). It's also interesting to think about what made C more influent than TP and when that happened. It's perhaps a combination of Unix being more popular and GCC appearing right around that time. It would be a good subject for a blog post, if that doesn't exist already.

Anyway, we're just speculating. I don't know if you're making TP seem more important than it was, because I wasn't around back then, but I'll choose to trust you on that account of events.

[VisualLab]

I really would like to hear a detailed expiation of why the Linux kernel has that requirement and what specific problems they had. This may have been an idea the creator had personally and imposed top down. If not I would expect new languages to have abandoned the declare anywhere variables but I've never heard a person complain about them except long time Pascal programers.

This is not the only requirement that Torvalds has imposed. Torvalds is known for swearing at programmers who submit code that does not meet established requirements. I don't really like Linux, but in this case he's absolutely right. The kernel code has long been bloated. If order and readability in the code had not been maintained, the kernel project would have failed long ago.

[VisualLab]

It's 2024 not sure why you keep bringing up those languages. Go find the top 20 most used languages in 2024 and they all have declare anywhere syntax I'm sure. Not saying this is argument against Pascal just that it's lost the argument in the wider field.

Yes, I agree. But saying "it's not popular any more" is not a sufficient argument to depart from its founding principles.

MarkMLl

This isn't even an argument. This is just a private opinion. Anyone can have any opinion.

Besides, it's 2024. So I don't see the point in insisting that the foundations of a language (in this case Pascal) should be changed ("turned upside down"). In the current year of 2024, the choice of programming languages ​​is really wide. You can easily use one that has the features desired by the owner of the opinion. After all, it's just a tool.

[VisualLab]

I wonder whether Delphi would have become such a bloated monstrosity if Anders Hejlsberg hadn't defected?

And after all these years, C# is still small? So you've got your answer

[VisualLab]

...most Danes feel uncomfortable in such situations...

Stroustrup too? And how can this be checked? (I'm asking because I don't know any Danes)

[440bx]

I still think at times where Pascal would be if the Unix creators chose it as their language (or Microsoft and Windows).

What helped C eventually become the dominant programming language is that it had (and has) a feature set that makes the language a good tool to write system programs such as an O/S.   I only know of one version of Pascal that was appropriate to write an O/S with and it's a proprietary version of the language that was designed specifically to write O/Ss and compilers with (one O/S and multiple compiler were written with it.)  For the record, it was not a PC class compiler and was not for the intel instruction set.

That C is more powerful than Pascal is a fact (with the exception I mentioned above) and, that is what eventually made it the top language but, it is a language for hard-core programmers, it is not a language for an engineer, scientist or casual user who is just looking to solve a problem.  The latter is what gave Turbo Pascal more users than any other language in the history of computing.  Of course, those days are long past.

[MarkMLl]

That said, sometime mid-1980s, just about anyone who could benefit from using a programming language used Turbo Pascal.  BASIC at one time was quite popular but, Turbo Pascal trounced BASIC because developing in Turbo was almost as fast as writing interpreted code while the resulting code was, at least, 10 times (if not more) faster.

I'm not comfortable with that. I was /selling/ programming languages at the time, and the combination of C and BASIC probably outsold Pascal somewhere between 5- and 10-to-one, and the market for extension libraries was very much larger (100-to-1 would not surprise me). And that completely ignores home computers with BASIC built in.

MarkMLl

[MarkMLl]

More importantly, he ignored Ada: he could hardly have been unaware of it since together with the other authors of the "Minority Report" on ALGOL-68 he had been retained as a consultant during its early design.

Yeah, I didn't notice that part. In my personal experience with some Pascal devs, I feel like most of them either didn't care about Ada/Modula-2/Oberon/Component Pascal (which is Oberon, not Pascal) or choose to ignore their existence, as if Pascal is the bee's knees. I might be wrong, as I am a young Padawan in this world (in both senses), thus I will not comment on the larger sentiment around these languages. I don't see many people promoting the other languages, less so among Pascal devs. Birds of a feather flock together, perhaps.

No, I think you're right and I'd emphasise the extent to which Delphi built on the underlying language to make it a usable development environment in the context of the dominant OS of the 1990s. And it's the usability of Lazarus that keeps people with it in the 2020s.

Interestingly, I've read a couple of columns by people doing embedded systems work which suggest that in their opinion Ada still has a very great deal going for it... at least until one starts looking for extension libraries etc.

MarkMLl

[MarkMLl]

But I wasn't talking about professional devs. I wouldn't call the people who were introduced to C out of necessity when they were introduced to Unix in university "professionals" (even though plenty of them ended up working in the field). I still think at times where Pascal would be if the Unix creators chose it as their language (or Microsoft and Windows). It's also interesting to think about what made C more influent than TP and when that happened. It's perhaps a combination of Unix being more popular and GCC appearing right around that time. It would be a good subject for a blog post, if that doesn't exist already.

Kernighan's 1981 critique of the language is obviously significant: he was not responsible for UNIX but was obviously involved at a relatively early stage. Also Stallman's anecdote that he tried to base his early open compiler (which ultimately became GCC) on one for Pastel ("an off-colour Pascal") but found that language-design choices had effectively made it impossible to port the compiler to relatively-small machines.

MarkMLl

[MarkMLl]

I only know of one version of Pascal that was appropriate to write an O/S with and it's a proprietary version of the language that was designed specifically to write O/Ss and compilers with (one O/S and multiple compiler were written with it.)  For the record, it was not a PC class compiler and was not for the intel instruction set.

Cray. One of the early ARM systems. Possibly Multics... I forget whether that was Pascal or PL/I but in any case it wasn't C. Probably others... /definitely/ others if one allows Ada, Modula-2 and Oberon as Pascal descendants.

And if one extends it to other non-C languages you've got the Burroughs MCP. /However/, the high-level part of that implementation language had a great deal of what was effectively inline assembler even if it was expressed as functions, so this is as much a cautionary tale as anything else: there's things in an OS that you can't write in idiomatic C, and there's things you can't write in idiomatic Pascal (irrespective of language, switching memory and process contexts takes Deep Magic).

MarkMLl

[440bx]

I'm not comfortable with that. I was /selling/ programming languages at the time, and the combination of C and BASIC probably outsold Pascal somewhere between 5- and 10-to-one, and the market for extension libraries was very much larger (100-to-1 would not surprise me). And that completely ignores home computers with BASIC built in.

MarkMLl

BASIC had quite a following until Turbo Pascal showed up.  C was a niche language (Bell labs) until late-ish 80s when it started to get out of the Bell closet.

For as common as BASIC was at one time (it was the hot dog of the computer field), it never had anything that remotely resembled a magazine with roughly 1.2 million bi-weekly subscribers publish utilities written in that language (PC Magazine) and that wasn't the only one which routinely used Turbo Pascal to offer utilities to its subscribers.

For a number of years, Turbo Pascal was a genuine phenomenon.  A genuine compiler that had a superbly easy and short development cycle (characteristics usually associated with interpreters), produced reasonably fast executables (unlike interpreters), was readily available for just a few bucks (I paid $29.99 for my first copy and, believe it or not, I bought it before I bought my first computer.)

I don't know the percentage but, anyone who used BASIC to attempt producing a useful program inevitably "graduated" to Turbo Pascal.  The result was so much better, there was no comparison.

I'm one of those, I used BASIC extensively (not to mention intensively) on an HP-85.  I ported hard core engineering FORTRAN IV programs that ran on an IBM 360 to it.  That was fun.