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From: ndiamond@watdaisy.UUCP (Norman Diamond)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: levelheight
Message-ID: <6879@watdaisy.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 24-Jan-85 14:19:58 EST
Article-I.D.: watdaisy.6879
Posted: Thu Jan 24 14:19:58 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 25-Jan-85 05:26:27 EST
References: <2340@hplabsc.UUCP> <4948@utzoo.UUCP> <6292@boring.UUCP> <354@topaz.ARPA> <256@gumby.UUCP>
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 39

> Can you give examples of things Pascal prevents you from doing, type-wise
> (leave out decent i/o, casts and type conversions, stuff like that - we all
> know that these are silly omissions from the language, and they ARE in
> Modula-2)?
>       Dan Frank

Theoretically, one could declare a record with a gigantic variant part,
which sets the size of an array component for every integer in some
sub-range.  Theoretically, one could write a procedure that could do
matrix operations on different-sized matrices when called by different
calling statements (or by two executions of the same calling statement).
However, PRACTICALLY speaking ....   This is answer #1 to the above
question.

2.  I predict that Ada's feature will be grossly abused, where the
programmer can specify the underlying values to be used in an enumerated
type.  Nonetheless, there are occasional valid needs for such a feature.

3.  Passing portions of arrays as procedure parameters.  That's a big
reason that there is still no substitute for Fortran, even for some new
code.

4.  Arrays of procedure names / function names.  C can simulate these
with function pointers.  (Ada has it for tasks, but that's not the same
thing and can only provide an expensive simulation for it.)

I'm sure there's more.

However, if one needs to do such things, there are still benefits to
debugging a Pascal program that does most of what's needed, before
turning to other languages.

-- Norman Diamond

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