Olin Lathrop wrote:

> William Chops" Westfield" wrote:
>> (Hmm.  I wonder if I can claim the reverse?  That languages that had
>> ANY standardization effort AFTER "C" became known should have paid
>> more attention to why C was gaining popularity?  Why didn't Pascal,
>> AS A STANDARDIZED LANGUAGE, pick up features that would have made it
>> more acceptable as a systems programming language?
> 
> First, Pascal didn't come after C, it preceeded it.  However, that
> wouldn't have prevented others from trying to standardize their
> variant later.  I think the reason is that this wasn't how things
> were done and how people were thinking back then.  Remember, this was
> back when every computer manufacturer had their own operating system
> and unique CPU.  

The ANSI started with standardization of C in 1983. It became an ISO
standard in 1990. 

> Those that developed their own useful Pascal variants saw them like
> intellectual property that gave their platform a competitive
> advantage.  

Looking at how things went, it seems like this was a bad choice. Maybe
K+R et al weren't that incapable after all...

> This was the prevailing mindset until the late 1980s when Sun overtook
> the workstation market on the strength of openess.

No, it wasn't. For some people, maybe, but there was an ANSI standard
for FORTRAN that dates back to 1965. (This and the backing of IBM were
probably two of the major factors for the popularity of FORTRAN.) If
ANSI took up standardization efforts for C in 1983, there was a push to
do this that started way before 1983. Something like this doesn't happen
out of the blue. So the mindset to standardize was there.

There is also an ISO standard for the original Pascal that dates back to
1983. But it seems that this standard wasn't usable; for a number of
reasons, everybody implemented their own versions. Which again is the
likely cause for the lack of popularity of each of them. For what it
seems, these Pascal dialects didn't only add features to the original
language, they also changed features and omitted others. This of course
doesn't help. 

(BTW, you sound almost like the ones that are trying to defend the C
shortcomings as features in the language wars :)

Gerhard
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