Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!uvm-gen!cavrak
From: cavrak@uvm-gen.UUCP (Steve Cavrak,113 Waterman,6561483,)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Standard Pascal: Who needs it?
Message-ID: <1218@uvm-gen.UUCP>
Date: 2 Jul 89 12:04:23 GMT
References: <1234@draken.nada.kth.se>
Sender: nobody@uvm-gen.UUCP
Organization: EMBA Computer Facility, Univ. of Vermont, Burlington.
Lines: 18

The other day I watched a friend port about 400 lines from Turbo Pascal on
a PC to Lightspeed on a Mac ... 

Besides the horror of discovering that the Mac has a problem with the
line-feed character, and that the European quote caused Lightspeed to
hang, Wes discovered the long list of "features" that "does not compute"
(pre initialized "variables" for instance; something strange about the
undocumented "byte" type, etc.).  

The conclusion was that this is "Fortran" all over again, and that
programmers have to adhere to "standards" while the manufacturers lure
them away with convenient features.  

If we want the new toys, that's the price.

Steve

(p.s.  I, for one, want the new toys!)