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From: scl@virginia.acc.virginia.edu (Steve Losen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Standard Pascal
Message-ID: <2756@virginia.acc.virginia.edu>
Date: 3 Jul 89 21:07:40 GMT
References: <8616@pyr.gatech.EDU> <18965@paris.ics.uci.edu> <18349@mimsy.UUCP>
Reply-To: scl@virginia.acc.Virginia.EDU (Steve Losen)
Organization: University of Va., Charlottesville, VA
Lines: 35

Here are two reasons not to fear the ANSI Pascal Standard:

First, the Standard does not discourage the development of extensions.
A compiler can comply with the ANSI Pascal Standard and still have
tons of extensions, provided that there is some way to either
turn them off or issue warning messages (at the user's request)
when the extensions are used.  I feel that the features
required by the Standard are far less ambitious than the extensions
that products such as Turbo Pascal add on.  The Pascal Standard is
sort of a "least common denominator".  In another article in this group,
someone listed some fairly minor missing standard features from Turbo
such as the procedures "get" and "put" and the ability to pass functions
and procedures as parameters.  Certainly these are no more difficult to
implement than string manipulations.  Furthermore, I recall seeing
several articles in this newsgroup from people who wanted to pass functions
as parameters in Turbo, so this is obviously a useful feature.

Second, the Standard specifies an "accepted" implementation of the
universal features of Pascal.  For example, the scope rules of
Pascal appear reasonably simple on the surface, but they can get a bit
tricky in certain instances.  Granted, the more subtle aspects of
Pascal scope rules can only be illustrated by somewhat bizarre
sequences of code, but they exist nonetheless.  The Standard also
nails down the rules for the "goto" statement (including the very useful
non-local goto).  It would be nice if all Pascal compilers agreed with
each other in these areas.  The Standard has removed a lot of ambiguity
from the Jensen and Wirth Pascal Report (the original standard).

Admittedly, there are a lot of applications that can't be written using
purely Standard Pascal.  But wouldn't it be nice to know that your
Pascal compiler would correctly compile and run most Standard Pascal
applications without you having to alter a single line of source code?
-- 
Steve Losen     scl@virginia.edu
University of Virginia Academic Computing Center