On Jul 1, 2009, at 8:04 AM, Olin Lathrop wrote:

> I think the reasons C eventually dominated were because there were  
> several
> free or low cost C compilers out there for a wide range of systems

I think a lot of work on pascal compilers was done on mainframes, and  
pretty much died with them (even I worked on the tops20 pascal  
compiler at one time!)  And a lot was aimed at the "teaching language"  
aspect rather than making pascal a more useful "general purpose  
programming language."  Consider UCSD pascal, which was one of the  
larger efforts, designed to be portable/etc.  But it had a pretty  
significant performance penalty over true compilers; it's only in the  
last decade or so that systems have really gotten fast enough that  
bytecode interpreted languages have begin to succeed.

For that matter, isn't a Pascal compiler part of gcc ("Gnu Compiler  
Collection", not "Gnu C Compiler", remember.)  That should mean that  
many of CPUs with a free C compiler also have a free pascal compiler.   
But I don't see much published using Gnu Pascal; is it really that  
useless?  (and if so, Why?)

BillW

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