Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!claris!drc
From: drc@claris.com (Dennis Cohen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: The programming CULT (WOW!?)
Message-ID: <11181@claris.com>
Date: 13 Aug 90 14:25:00 GMT
References: <9649@goofy.Apple.COM> <1203.26c2f334@waikato.ac.nz> <9698@goofy.Apple.COM> <1990Aug11.022446.29404@laguna.ccsf.caltech.edu>
Organization: Claris Corporation, Santa Clara CA
Lines: 44

chi@tybalt.caltech.edu (Curt Hagenlocher) writes:

>In article <9698@goofy.Apple.COM> chewy@apple.com (Paul Snively) writes:
>>In article <1203.26c2f334@waikato.ac.nz> ccc_ldo@waikato.ac.nz (Lawrence 
>>D'Oliveiro, Waikato University) writes:
>>> In <9649@goofy.Apple.COM>, chewy@apple.com (Paul Snively) says
>>> "Semantically, there are no significant differences between Pascal and 
>>C".
>>> 
>>> Untrue. There are some important ones. It's true that the standard
>>> Mac Pascal dialect easily matches C in its ability to do low-level
>>> stuff. But Pascal also has some high-level features that have no C
>>> equivalent.
>>
>>Semantic features or syntactic features?  And what are they?

>The ability to nest procedures in Pascal is something to which
>nothing in C is analagous, or even close.

What about the ability in C to declare variables within blocks in the midst of
your code?  This gives them scoping during only that block and enclosed
blocks.  I would think that this is pretty darn close.  As Chewy points out,
this is a syntactic rather than semantic difference between the languages.
See the following for an example:

  short foo(short a, short b)
  {
    long bar;

    bar = a+b;
    {
      long blech;

      blech = bar/a;
    } /* blech is no longer visible */
    return (a/b);
  }


-- 
Dennis Cohen
Claris Corp.
 ****************************************************
Disclaimer:  Any opinions expressed above are _MINE_!