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From: jack@boring.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: Standardization
Message-ID: <6360@boring.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 18-Mar-85 08:43:32 EST
Article-I.D.: boring.6360
Posted: Mon Mar 18 08:43:32 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 20-Mar-85 04:09:46 EST
References: <322@gumby.UUCP> <7025@watdaisy.UUCP>
Reply-To: jack@boring.UUCP (Jack Jansen)
Distribution: net
Organization: CWI, Amsterdam
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Summary: 
Apparently-To: rnews@mcvax.LOCAL

In article <7025@watdaisy.UUCP> ndiamond@watdaisy.UUCP (Norman Diamond) writes:
>Let's see, Unix and C have only been evolving for around 16 years, and C is
>close to being standardised.  Pascal has been around for about, oh 16 years,
>and is a little bit closer to being standardised.  Interesting though, current
>and historical implementations of Pascal have fewer variations than for C.

I disagree. I get the impression that C is far more standardised
that pascal. Although the *environment* of different C dialects
is different, the *syntax* of the language is the same.

 This is clearly not the case with Pascal. Just think of 'otherwise',
'extern' versus 'external' versus 'fortran' versus whatever,
and the fact that Pascal I/O is built into the compiler (it looks
like procedure calls, but it isn't. You try to write a procedure that
accepts multiple parameters, or a parameter of 'any file' type).

 Although you will have a *lot* of trouble to simulate 'chdir' if
your target machine doesn't have directories, you can probably still
come up with something. If your Pascal compiler doesn't have
'otherwise' or something similar, you have to change even the 
structure of the program.

 I know of no such syntactical differences in C compilers, maybe with
the exception of multiple defined externs (which you shouldn't have used
anyway), and long identifiers. Both of these are much less serious
than the differences in Pascal-flavors.
-- 
	Jack Jansen, {decvax|philabs|seismo}!mcvax!jack
It's wrong to wish on space hardware.