On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 2:39 PM, Gerhard Fiedler
<lists@connectionbrazil.com>wrote:

> Wirth created Pascal at the ETH in Z=FCrich; not more
> commercial than AT&T, it seems, perhaps less :)


the original Pascal was only intended to be able to teach the logic of
structured programming. It is just a coincident that it turned out that the
language was quite friendly so with some improvements it could used for
commercial programming as well. The incompatibility was only coming because
of these error and try efforts: Everyone wanted to make their commercialised
implementation better than the other -- same stuff as what you can see now
with the C compilers for PIC: Each of them differs where they can be, like
pragmas, fuses, types, libraries etc. You need to put some effort but can
still implement your code into another C compiler than it was originally
written to -- same as with Pascal... I cannot see the difference much?

Tamas




>
>
> I don't think there's a big difference in balance between research and
> commercial compiler writers between C and Pascal. I think it wasn't
> until the early 80ies that the first commercial Pascal compilers showed
> up (Watcom, Apple, Borland). Until then, it seems, they were all created
> by universities. And after then, there were just as many commercial C
> compilers.
>
> > Of course there were standards, but companies opening their
> > proprietary operating systems and large programs like compilers was
> > certainly not the prevailing way things were done.
>
> Right. But IMO this hasn't much to do with C's popularity or Pascal's
> lack thereof. I think the main reason is that there was, from the 80ies
> on, pretty much /one/ C but many (incompatible) Pascals. A compiler
> writer didn't have a clear road to follow for compatibility. The
> standard wasn't suitable and not popular anyway, and then there were the
> many proprietary and diverging dialects.
>
> >> 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.
> >
> > I'm guessing that didn't work because it was too late.
>
> You probably didn't read up on the history, and on the standard itself.
> C wasn't standardized until later, so 1983 wasn't too late. The thing is
> that there doesn't seem to have been a consensus what makes a "good"
> Pascal, so there wasn't /a/ Pascal, there were many Pascals -- and all
> incompatible with each other. The only consensus, it seems, was that the
> standard isn't good enough, so Pascal programmers never seemed to have
> cared about standard conformance. Which is different from C; for the
> typical C programmer, standard conformance was always an issue. (First
> the K+R "standard", then the C89 standard. C99 is here, but not quite
> yet. Most compilers don't support it, so the kind of inofficial standard
> is still C89.)
>
> > A lot of code existed in each version, so I'm guessing nobody wanted
> > to have their code orphaned.
>
> If this was the case, it was a bad decision, it seems -- rather than
> getting together, making some compromise, create a common and usable
> standard and live on, they wanted only their proprietary piece and died.
> This may be a lesson...
>
> Gerhard
>
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