Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!shadooby!ginosko!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!tut!tukki!sakkinen From: sakkinen@tukki.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen) Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal Subject: Extended Pascal standard (Was: Re: No Obfuscations yet.) Message-ID: <1845@tukki.jyu.fi> Date: 27 Oct 89 09:07:56 GMT References: <467@e-street.Morgan.COM> <41232@bu-cs.BU.EDU> Reply-To: sakkinen@jytko.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen) SAKKINEN@FINJYU.bitnet (alternative) Organization: University of Jyvaskyla, Finland Lines: 50 In article <41232@bu-cs.BU.EDU> art@cs.bu.edu (Al Thompson) writes: >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. > No, I am not one of them, just a satisfied customer :-). More exactly, it's the Joint ANSI X3J9 / IEEE P770 Pascal Standards Committee, chaired by Thomas N. Turba from Unisys. One of the committee members, David Joslin, has written several times about the proposed extensions in ACM SIGPLAN Notices during the last 2 - 3 years. There have been some other articles about Extended Pascal, too, in the same journal. The newest "Working Draft : Programming Language Extended Pascal" is dated August 18, 1989 and has xiv + 241 pages, so it _is_ extended. I have sent a couple of comments to the committee, and they really seem to have handled all public comments meticulously. (The difference between their responses and the comments one gets e.g. about a conference paper from the reviewers is enormous.) On the other hand: In article schwartz@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz) writes (_not_ referring the above!): > ... > [...] Let pascal be pascal, and use something else if >you want something else. > >Go read "Object Oriented Software Construction" by Bertrand Meyer to >see what a modern language looks like. He designed Eiffel to be clean >and complete, and not built out of ad-hoc experimental extensions. >Very much in the spirit of pascal as conceived by Wirth. It is really an open question whether an extended Pascal has a future, since we have so many good newer languages. I agree with Scott Schwarz about Eiffel. Concerning Wirth, I think his newest language, Oberon, is regress rather than progress: if one tries to remove all features that are known to be misused by some programmers, one ends up with a language much too Spartan for the good programmers. And even then, as many people have pointed out, it is impossible to prevent bad programmers from writing bad code. Markku Sakkinen Department of Computer Science University of Jyvaskyla (a's with umlauts) Seminaarinkatu 15 SF-40100 Jyvaskyla (umlauts again) Finland