Hacker News Reader

Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

Hmm. Didn't Turbo Pascal have array bounds checking 3 billion years ago when we all had pet dinosaurs? It could have simply been added to the compiler in C as well...

View on HN

Turbo Pascal had a lot of good ideas back in the late 80s and early 90s which were ridiculed back then and are now considered best practices… modules, safe strings, safe arrays, Delphi added quite nice objects. Alas, it was never popular in the Internet age. Just imagine if we had pascalscript instead of JavaScript - a decade of wasted developer time saved…

Correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t a few BASIC dialects, like QuickBasic and Turbo Basic, also support that back then?

Truly bizarre that we ended up with C, still feature incomplete compared to what was available at the time.

The history of technology is littered with examples of a technically superior solution being abandoned for a crappier solution.

All major systems programming languages starting with JOVIAL in 1958, had bounds checking.

ESPOL/NEWP from 1961, almost a decade before C came to be, even had unsafe code blocks!

There are those that would argue that the reasons for Pascal being lesser known than it should, involve the machinations of AT&T, other corporate entities, and orchestrated negative media. Pascal was in the way of what they were trying to push.

And if people look deeper, there are some surprising elements of Pascal in newer languages, more than many realize. At some point, sanity and common sense will sneak through.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com