Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!purdue!bu-cs!art
From: art@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Al Thompson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: No Obfuscations yet.
Message-ID: <41232@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 26 Oct 89 17:33:47 GMT
References: <467@e-street.Morgan.COM>
Reply-To: art@cs.bu.edu (Al Thompson)
Followup-To: comp.lang.pascal
Organization: Boston University
Lines: 34

In article <467@e-street.Morgan.COM> amull@Morgan.COM (Andrew P. Mullhaupt) writes:
>
>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?

There is a new standard for Extended Pascal that should be out soon.  This
group is read by members of the Joint Pascal Standard Committee (X3/J9).
Perhaps one of them would be kind enough to enlighten us as to the current
state of affairs.

>
>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?

These items are all covered in the new proposed standard.

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

This should be possible in the context of the new Standard, provided some
additional constructs are defined.  These constructs are necessarily
included in another language definition, in spirit of a structure
definition language as proposed by DeRemer and Kron in "Programming in the
Large Versus Programming in the Small".  The article appeared in IEEE
Trans. Softw. Eng. in 1976.