Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!shadooby!ginosko!uunet!mstan!amull
From: amull@Morgan.COM (Andrew P. Mullhaupt)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: splitting comp.lang.pascal, Turbo Pascal
Summary: Don't split comp.lang.pascal
Message-ID: <438@e-street.Morgan.COM>
Date: 10 Oct 89 14:53:26 GMT
References: <13380@reed.UUCP> <111@m1.cs.man.ac.uk> <408@uwm.edu>
Organization: Morgan Stanley & Co. NY, NY
Lines: 31

In article <408@uwm.edu>, chad@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (D. Chadwick Gibbons) writes:
> 	comp.lang.pascal doesn't have enough traffic to warrent a subgroup.
> such a creation would be a waste.

I tend to agree. Also; I think there is another reason why Turbo Pascal should
be kept in comp.lang.pascal.

It is important in the Pascal world to remember that our hallowed (and I am a
true believer in the standardization example of Pascal) standards do not cover
important topics real programming problems bring up. Many of the Turbo users'
questions are the kind of machine and implementation specific grit we try not
to think about from the point of view of standards. It is important for the
Pascal community to see what the issues are, so that if possible, we can come
up with well-structured responses to these questions which can extend the spirit
of the Pascal standard to the dark corners of I/O, communications and graphics
programming.

The unhappy possibility is that implementors will merely borrow some C library
functions and slap pseudo-Pascal wrappers on top of it. Not thinking about
these issues will not help either; just take Sun's UNIX pc for example.

Keeping a unified news group is one way to help keep Pascal unified. Once a 
language falls apart, (C, Lisp and APL are examples of the danger here) it's
really awful to get people back together. If the weight of the Turbo traffic
is getting you down, use the "K" feature of rn, or the like, but first ask
yourself is there that much traffic? We certainly don't have to put up with
the comp.lang.c or ibm.pc level of bandwidth!

Let's keep Pascal beautiful!

Andrew Mullhaupt