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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

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pjmlp·

How Pascal critics love to ignore ISO Extended Pascal introduced to fix those issues.

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That's because my scars of trying to use Pascal before the ISO extensions are still there.

So no access to either VMS Pascal nor UCSD Pascal then.

Nope. Jensen & Wirth, if I recall correctly. The only upgrade we had was separate compilation.

If I recall correctly, no. The only upgrade from Jensen & Wirth was separate compilation.

But then ISO Pascal is not 50 years old, far from it.

The Pascal from 50 years ago was not that great in practice.

It was released in 1990, a bit younger, 30 years.

More than enough to be aware of its existence, specially when ISO C first release is from 1989.

Also all ISO Pascal issues were fixed in ISO Modula-2, released in 1978, 42 years ago.

A huge, 2-decades gap. Way too late, because in the meantime, Turbo Pascal had been developed and made the language practical (and btw I'm still impressed by the quality of TP's "IDE" for the time), and in 1990 you had several competing standards that split the community, between original "academic" Pascal, Turbo Pascal, Object Pascal, ISO Pascal, and a little later Delphi. Add that to the fact Wirth himself had lost interest in the language for a long time and had developed several better ones (Modula-2 indeed, Oberon too).

Well, to be fair only clueless developers were using ISO Pascal without extensions, with VMS Pascal and UCSD Pascal being two well known ones.

Just like no one was using proper K&R C outside UNIX, rather dialects like Small-C and BDS C.

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