On Feb 12, 2009, at 5:10 AM, Olin Lathrop wrote:

> The "absence of restrictions" is exactly what I'm talking about.

It's fascinating that the least "professionally regarded" languages  
have become the most successful (BASIC and C, right?)

Sometimes I think C succeeded solely on the basis of being able to do:
    myuart = (struct uartregs *)0xFFFF8C80;

The last time this discussion went around, you were advocating a  
Pascal that had been extended to support the various constructs  
required for embedded software, but I don't recall whether those  
extensions had been formalized into a standard specification or not?    
I'd certainly have trouble going out and BUYING Pascal for PIC, AVR,  
PC, Mac, ARM, freescale, MIPS, 8051, Renesas, Z80, etc.  Walter hits  
the nail on the head with "portability" arguments; it doesn't matter  
how wonderful a language might be if it's only implemented on a  
particular architecture (or a small number of architectures.)  (BASIC  
is pretty hopeless; I don't have any faith whatsoever that the  
features of one microcontroller basic will map easily onto another's.)

BillW

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