Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!saxony!dgil
From: dgil@pa.reuter.COM (Dave Gillett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: Turbo Pascal vs. C
Message-ID: <411@saxony.pa.reuter.COM>
Date: 23 Sep 90 21:21:38 GMT
References: <F*=-d162@cs.psu.edu> <1990Sep20.164153.28641@portia.Stanford.EDU> <1990Sep21.220031.19274@sj.ate.slb.com>
Distribution: comp
Organization: Reuter:file Inc  (A Reuter Company) Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 24

In <1990Sep21.220031.19274@sj.ate.slb.com> poffen@sj.ate.slb.com (Russell Poffenberger) writes:

>But pascal was never intended to be a "useful" language. It was developed as
>an aid in teaching structured programming. C is much more accepted as an
>industry standard for software programming than pascal.

I've recently seen material which suggested that this common story of the
origin of Pascal is not quite accurate.  However, we must also consider that
Turbo Pascal, right from version 1, set out to correct the deficiencies of
Standard Pascal for "real" development, and has continued to do so with each
new version.  In fact, as of version 5.0, Turbo was as close to Modula-2 as
it could get in "software engineering" features while retaining Pascal syntax,
and 5.5 goes on to add object-oriented extensions as well.

It's true that C has become something of an industry standard, much as COBOL
once did.  As far as I can see, that means that anybody who knows C can find
a job, even if they don't use it very well, but only the best can get paid
to use Turbo Pascal.  (I believe it's incredibly easy to write bad C code;
I see it regularly.  Bad Turbo Pascal code seems considerably rarer.)

You should learn C if you want to be sure of finding work.  But I wouldn't
tackle it until you understand how to write it well, and you could cut your
teeth on considerably worse languages than Turbo Pascal.
                                               Dave