Tamas Rudnai wrote:

> 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?

You need to look at the bigger picture. C didn't become popular because
of PICs. There are many C programs that compile (and run) on any
standard-compliant compiler, on quite different platforms. While
platform differences sometimes need some conditional parts in the code,
it is possible (and common) to write portable C code that compiles on
gcc, VC++ (in C mode) and a number of other compilers and runs on Linux,
Unix, Solaris, Windows, Mac OSX and others (and depending on the amount
of resources and OS support required for the specific program, also on a
bare-metal PIC). 

Also, while with Pascal you may be able to port your code from one
Pascal to the other, from one platform to the other, but then you have
two (or more) code bases. With C, even if you have to make adjustments
for a specific platform, you usually integrate them into the code -- and
end up with code that compiles and works on the previously supported
platforms and on the new platform.

Try that with (any) Pascal. The lack of standardization (and of a
standard preprocessor, for the sometimes necessary platform adjustments)
makes this pretty much impossible.

(I'm not trying to say that "C is better than Pascal" :)

Gerhard
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