Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!shelby!neon!pescadero.Stanford.EDU!philip
From: philip@pescadero.Stanford.EDU (Philip Machanick)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: The programming CULT (WOW!?)
Message-ID: <1990Aug13.190518.14696@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 13 Aug 90 19:05:18 GMT
References: <5649@castle.ed.ac.uk> <9649@goofy.Apple.COM> <1203.26c2f334@waikato.ac.nz> <9698@goofy.Apple.COM>
Sender: news@Neon.Stanford.EDU (USENET News System)
Reply-To: philip@pescadero.stanford.edu
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
Lines: 37

In article <5649@castle.ed.ac.uk>, tjc@castle.ed.ac.uk (A J Cunningham) 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
> 
> >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 :-)

"Faults"? Depends on your point of view. Was Pascal intended to be used for
systems programming? Wasn't this why Wirth then moved on to Modula-2? By the
way, Pascal _does_ have bit operations (I believe that's what Wirth intended
sets to be for).

Philip Machanick
philip@pescadero.stanford.edu