Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!tjc
From: tjc@castle.ed.ac.uk (A J Cunningham)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: The programming CULT (WOW!?)
Message-ID: <5649@castle.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 13 Aug 90 09:03:18 GMT
References: <9649@goofy.Apple.COM> <1203.26c2f334@waikato.ac.nz> <9698@goofy.Apple.COM>
Organization: Edinburgh University Colouring Book Software
Lines: 35

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

>Semantic features or syntactic features?  And what are they?

	I guess it depends on what you mean by Pascal. If you stick to
the language described by Wirth and ignore any extensions (I'm not
familiar with ANSI) there are some significant differnces.

Initialisation of data structures at compile-time.
Type casts. (Pascal goes out of its way to try and stop these.)
No static variables.
No 'break' or 'continue' statements.
No guaranteed order of evaluation for logical operators.
No default for 'case'.
No bit operators.
No macro processor.

Of course a CS type (like myself) might be tempted to argue that both
languages are computationally equivalent. But then as a programmer I'd
be tempted to tell a CS type that a language with a list of faults like
the ones listed above isn't worth using for systems programming :-)
		Tony

-- 
Tony Cunningham, Edinburgh University Computing Service. tjc@castle.ed.ac.uk

		If a man among you has no sin upon his hand
	    Let him throw a stone at me for playing in the band.