Ask HN: Is it just an accident that Pascal can be compiled extremely fast?
Or was Pascal designed in a way to make this possible?
“Sophistication in syntax analysis was very much in style in the 1960s, allegedly because of the power and flexibility required to process high-level languages. It occurred to me then that a much simpler and more perspicuous method could well be used, if the syntax of a language was chosen with the process of its analysis in mind. The second attempt at building a compiler therefore began with its formulation in the source language itself, which by that time had evolved into what was published as Pascal in 1970 [Wirth, 1970], The compiler was to be a single-pass system based on the proven top-down, recursive-descent principle for syntax analysis.”
In short, the language design meant that the compiler didn't have to do much, so what it did, it could do quickly.
They were doing really well with the royalties from Borland, and the highlight of Preben's story is when he went to a Porsche dealer to trade his BMW for a 928 (as I recall). The dealer would not offer him a good enough trade-in price for the BMW, until Preben suggested that he would just buy two Porsches instead of one. I am sure today's crypto-bros can tell even more impressive stories, but for mid-80s Denmark that one was actually quite above average.
Unfortunately, the money that PolyData made on Turbo Pascal was all wasted trying to enter the ERP business with a system named Albatross that even IBM viewed as a serious competitor to their IBM Navigator system at one point. However, at years' end reporting, a bug in Albatross would cause all the financial records to get chewed up, which made the system very hard to sell after that. The Albatross disaster caused PolyData to eventually go under, and Heglsberg left PolyData to go work for Borland in the US.
After PolyData, Preben started a small PC games distribution company called PolyMedia, and, as I was a (very young man) in the games business in the mid 90s myself, I would always bump into him in London at the bi-annual ECTS computer trade show, where we would go out for dinner and get very drunk, and he would share his many stories of past fame & fortune.
Interesting case of nominative determinism
Pascal's original use was the latter case.
See for example Wirth’s https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20....:
“Compared to Algol 60, its range of applicability is considerably increased due to a variety of data structuring facilities. In view of its intended usage both as a convenient basis to teach programming and as an efficient tool to write large programs…”