Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!zephyr!tektronix!percival!bucket!leonard
From: leonard@bucket.UUCP (Leonard Erickson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re^2: Standard Pascal: Who needs it?
Message-ID: <1523@bucket.UUCP>
Date: 3 Jul 89 12:53:36 GMT
References: <1234@draken.nada.kth.se> <1218@uvm-gen.UUCP>
Organization: Rick's Home-Grown UNIX; Portland, OR.
Lines: 28

cavrak@uvm-gen.UUCP (Steve Cavrak,113 Waterman,6561483,) writes:

>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.  

Well, at least Borland has a section in the manual that spells out the ways
in which Turbo Pascal isn't ANSI compliant. Both extensions and ommissions
are listed.

BTW, have you noticed that Microsft is advertising QuickPascal as being
compatible with Turbo Pascal? I guess that tells us what the de facto
standard is for IBMs and clones...  :-)

-- 
Leonard Erickson		...!tektronix!reed!percival!bucket!leonard
CIS: [70465,203]
"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools.
Let's start with typewriters." -- Solomon Short