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From: doug@xdos.UUCP (Doug Merritt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Can you nest subroutines in C?
Summary: oh, pascal! (ick)
Message-ID: <395@xdos.UUCP>
Date: 30 Jun 89 15:28:20 GMT
References: <4495@crash.cts.com> <18161@usc.edu> <17863@swrinde.nde.swri.edu>
Reply-To: doug@xdos.UUCP (Doug Merritt)
Organization: Hunter Systems, Mountain View CA (Silicon Valley)
Lines: 34

In article <17863@swrinde.nde.swri.edu> kent@swrinde.UUCP (Kent D. Polk) writes:
>Some versions of Pascal do allow this. Hewlett Packard Pascal does for

Oh, please, let's not drag the rotting corpse of nonstandard Pascals
into this. A friend of mine in college (Bob Toxen) added essentially all
of the features of C to his version of Basic (SuperBasic). Wouldn't it
be a little wierd for me to therefore say "gee, anything you can do in
C you can do in Basic. As long as it's *that* version of Basic, of course,
widely unavailable, but you *could*"

Pascal is brain damaged. It's a toy language designed for teaching programming
that ran amok (as even Niklaus Wirth admits). The set of changes that
turn Pascal into a (standard) usable language are known as "Modula 2",
and even then it's got two major problems: you can't statically initialize
data (even assembler allows *that*), and you have to import/export
everything in sight. There are still some people who think that this is
a *feature*, but as a casual perusal of the literature will point out,
the problem is that it's such a bother that, in large projects, people
quickly start importing and exporting all kinds of things that shouldn't
be, because it's too much trouble to locate and edit out archaic imports/
exports, resulting in import/export lists half a page long. Sure, big
help in maintaining programs, ha-ha. It was an experiment in language
design that ended as a failure, not having accomplished what it intended.

This is still a relatively minor inconvenience, though, not something to
make or break a language.

The thing I hate about *C* is that it doesn't have support for variable
length list data, other than strings. This is a major nuisance when
writing e.g. lisp-flavored programs.
	Doug
-- 
Doug Merritt		{pyramid,apple}!xdos!doug
Member, Crusaders for a Better Tomorrow		Professional Wildeyed Visionary