Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mstan!amull
From: amull@Morgan.COM (Andrew P. Mullhaupt)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: No Obfuscations yet.
Message-ID: <467@e-street.Morgan.COM>
Date: 25 Oct 89 16:41:57 GMT
Organization: Morgan Stanley & Co. NY, NY
Lines: 35

Well, I guess nobody knows of any obfuscations worth posting in Pascal. So
far, I got one suggestion (which could be pretty opaque, but not very terse,
in my opinion) which is along the lines of:

type  real = integer;

var writeln : real;

and so on, using the redifinability of identifiers (not keywords, I think)
in Pascal. If put in different scopes, (and hiding each other on the way),
you could get something pretty hard to read, but not (in my opinion) anything
on the order of Obfuscated C. This is more or less as I expected, and for me
this more or less closes the issue.

So since nobody wants to talk about Obfuscation, what about interest in a
more recent standard? In particular; do Pascal programmers want to standardize
some widespread extensions to the language?

I think we ought to standardize:

1. The Unit construction for separate compilation. (I like the ones found in
   Turbo or Microsoft Pascal better than those in Sun pascal, for example.)

2. Function and procedure types, (again as found in most of your PC Pascals).

3. What about some kind of extensible arrays? Are conformant arrays what we
   want or should we go for something different?

4. Objects and methods as in Object Pascal. Are these Pascal? Are they good?
   (I don't know, I'm just asking...)

What do other people think?

Later,
Andrew Mullhaupt