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From: jack@mcvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang.c,net.lang.pascal
Subject: Pascal vs C, again (was: Pascals Origins)
Message-ID: <7014@boring.mcvax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 17-Jul-86 12:10:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: boring.7014
Posted: Thu Jul 17 12:10:51 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 18-Jul-86 06:26:05 EDT
References: <2222@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Reply-To: jack@boring.uucp (Jack Jansen)
Organization: AMOEBA project, CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 27
Xref: utcs net.lang.c:9793 net.lang.pascal:574
Apparently-To: rnews@mcvax


I'm getting sick and tired of all those people picking on pascal,
and saying "C is better", without giving *any* reason for it.

Don't get me wrong, I use C every day, and pascal (luckily) only
every other day, but pascal has one enormous advantage over C:
when I get the compiler to accept my program, it will do what I
intended in 99% of the cases.
With C, the compiler will catch 30% of the bugs, lint will catch
another 30%, and the other 40% has to be tackled using adb, 
if (debug ) printf...., and rubbish like that.

You can say a lot of things about pascal, but not that it wasn't
well-designed. And, even though you have to do very wierd things
to get some things to work, it *is* possible to write medium to
large scale programs in it, and get them to work *fast*. Anyone
interested in my SMTP mail server, and my RFC822 mailer written in
pascal in ~3 months (2 days/week)? I'm now working on it's counterpart
in C, and it isn't even *half* finished in that time, let alone
debugged.

As an aside: as soon as I can get my employers to buy Modula-2
compilers (and rewrite all existing software in that language, also),
I will happily rm /bin/cc and DELETE CMDNC0>PASCAL.SAVE. But
that wasn't what this discussion was about......
-- 
	Jack Jansen, jack@mcvax.UUCP
	The shell is my oyster.