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Path: utzoo!watmath!atbowler
From: atbowler@watmath.UUCP (Alan T. Bowler [SDG])
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Pascal for teaching
Message-ID: <16756@watmath.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 9-Oct-85 12:03:34 EDT
Article-I.D.: watmath.16756
Posted: Wed Oct  9 12:03:34 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 10-Oct-85 08:26:43 EDT
References: <685@bu-cs.UUCP> <2944@ncsu.UUCP>
Reply-To: atbowler@watmath.UUCP (Alan T. Bowler [SDG])
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 16
Summary: 

In article <2944@ncsu.UUCP> mauney@ncsu.UUCP (Jon Mauney) writes:
>A) Occasionally I feel the need to point out that although Pascal is far
>   from ideal, it is quite possible to write large programs with separate
>   compilation while maintaining reasonable portability

Unfortunately the pascal standard doesn't agree.  Separate compilation
is explicitly NOT a feature of standard Pascal, and as a result the
normal Fortran/C practice of developing a utility library is not
available to someone wanting to write a portable program.
   It is true that separate compilation is such a desirable feature
that most implementors (myself included) define 1 or more ways of
doing separate compilation.  However, these mechanisms are by all non-standard
and the details and semantics vary from implementation to implementation.
   Textbooks generally only deal with standard pascal, and as a result
it is very difficult to teach the idea that you build a large program
out of a set of small separately compiled modules.