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Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

> I started with Turbo Pascal 3, Moved to 4, 4.5, 5, 6 then Delphi. Somewhere in there moved to "C" and then "C++".

I never understand why people use "C" as opposed to C.

Does anyone use "Pascal" as opposed to Pascal?

If it was Borland's compiler suite it may or may not have been perfectly standards-compliant, hence the quotation marks. The Borland suite from the early 90s seemed to be pretty relaxed/forgiving about what was valid C/C++.

My school utilized Turbo C++ 3.0 for instruction (and later 4.5), which implemented some weird subset that was pre-C++98. Plenty of things that I was doing when targeting the Borland compiler barfed terribly when compiled with GCC (or G++).

I'd definitely consider what we were writing in those days "C" or "C++" but not anything that resembles modern software...

Borland C++ was released before 1993. No wonder it didn't support C++98 at that time.

Not only that, but Borland also had extensions in their C++ compiler to simplify the development of GUI code (similar but different to the tricks Microsoft also used in their compilers).

I assume they are doing that to distinguish the Borland products (Borland C and Borland C++) from the programming languages. Everything in that sentence is the name of a Borland product.

Ugh - sorry this quoting must be my own thing - I don't know why I keep quoting btw, and unfortunately can't tell if anyone else does it (you mentioned people, but you might've just wanted to be polite to me - hehe).

I'll try to work on that! it got me thinking... why the heck!

You certainly aren't the only one, but it's still odd enough to be marked.

(To be more precise, I've seen C in quotes multiple times and maybe that's because one letter looks too small to be a name to some people, but I don't think I've ever seen C++ in quotes before.)

If you’re going to quote C please note that you should be using single quotes: ‘C’

Depends on whether I want the string constant or the character constant.

lol, next time I decide to back-quote C - I'll do it this way - hehehe

I hadn't seen it before this. Stood out to me.

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