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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

From wikipedia:

"Pascal was influenced by the ALGOL W efforts, with the explicit goals of teaching programming in a structured fashion and for the development of system software.[5] A generation of students used Pascal as an introductory language in undergraduate courses."

Its grammar made it relatively easy to write compilers for the language, which could be done as undergraduate exercises. Of course, this did not make it so popular with professional programmers - see http://eprg.org/computerphile/pascal.pdf by Brian Kernighan, although extended Pascals such as Delphi were very productive in the Windows environment.

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I have the greatest respect for Prof. Kernighan, but history hasn't been kind to C's unbounded arrays and strings, however convenient they may be for the programmer. Moreover, just two years after his critique, Turbo Pascal would come out with an environment that is still revered as a pioneering and exceptionally productive IDE. It outsold C compilers by multiple orders of magnitude in the mid-1980s. (And that's ignoring unlicensed copies.)

Turbo Pascal's successor, Delphi, was a successful rapid application development environment, and still being used today. Pascal was used extensively at Apple for the Apple III and Lisa, and was also the original development environment for Mac apps.[1]

But he was probably right about Ada, which has survived and may even be enjoying something of a renaissance as a fix for the sins of C (and C++) that isn't as alienating as Rust.

[1] https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_applelisapriefHistoryo...

His critice was already outdated by 1978, because Modula-2, Pascal's sucessor, explicitly designed for systems programming, after Niklaus Wirth sabatical year at Xerox PARC, where he learned about Mesa, Xerox Star written in Mesa, the IDE like experience of Tajo and XDE, he came back to ETHZ and created Modula-2, Lilith personal workstation and related OS in Modula-2.

Modula-2, designed for memory safe systems programming, in 1978, succedding Pascal, had support for unbounded arrays and strings.

By the way, GCC nowadays has GNU Modula-2 integrated in the official set of supported languages.

I used to be a professional Delphi programmer, but I would not have described Delphi as "extremely successful", partially due to its mismanagement by the various owners of the IP. Its noticeable that Delphi's inventor went on to far greater success with a C-like language - C#.

Edited. Fortunately C# (like Java) fixes what Prof. Kernighan praised about C - unbounded pointers/arrays/strings. At the expense of unpredictable performance due to garbage collection. C# and Java (and JavaScript) retain C-like syntax, but their underpinnings/VMs were heavily influenced by Self and Smalltalk. (Note Pascal also pioneered bytecode compilers.)

It surely was all over the place in Europe, and still has some spots, hence why in Germany, you can keep coming to yearly Delphi conferences.

https://entwickler-konferenz.de/program-en/

Turbo Pascal wasn't just a good tool, it was a pioneer in how it was marketed and priced. It was relatively affordable, only $49, at a time when tools generally cost in the hundreds. And they ran monthly ads in nearly every computer magazine. If you wanted to hack on things on your PC, and you didn't already work for a company that would buy you to tools, you really had two choices, BASIC and Turbo Pascal.

Turbo Pascal was fantastic when it arrived. A revolution. And not just the affordable price, there was also the "book license". The compiler could be used by any number of people, anywhere, just not at the same time. And suddenly there was speed, very quick development cycle, easy debugging, and, not the least, LOTS of memory unlike other compiler environments I used at the time. The editor and compilers typically used so much memory that there was barely enough room to write your code. Not so with Turbo Pascal.

I really really dislike the, "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language" esp when you have a horse in the race as he did.

v nice thanks. I think Pascal was the first language we were thought in school, just before C.

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