Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!uwvax!oddjob!ncar!ames!pacbell!hoptoad!unisoft!gethen!isaac
From: isaac@gethen.UUCP (Isaac Rabinovitch)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Pascal vs. Algol (Was: Algol 60 vs Algol 68 (was "stack machines (Burroughs)"))
Summary: Pascal Uber Alles
Message-ID: <980@gethen.UUCP>
Date: 1 Jul 88 07:24:52 GMT
References: <1521@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1532@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <476@pcrat.UUCP> <5195@june.cs.washington.edu>
Organization: There's Unix there in Oakland
Lines: 21

In article <5195@june.cs.washington.edu>, pardo@june.cs.washington.edu (David Keppel) writes:
(In response to my asserstions about why Pascal is so popular.)
> + Simplicity: can be implemented reliablly.
> + Simplicity: can be understood effectively.
> + Quality: The language had years of thinking in it before it came
>   into an implementation.
> + Straightforward: A compiler can do little optimization and produce
>   good code.
> + Defintion: There is a good standard to adhere to.
The first three maybe apply to Pascal, but they apply even more so to
LISP!  As for the last, well, the most widely used Pascal compiler
knowadays is Turbo....
> 
> I think that these reasons (and others) are responsible for the
> vendors' choice of Pascal over Xyz.
You sort of unintentionally make my point here when you can't remember
the name of any languages that were seriously in the running against
Pascal.  You say they "chose" Pascal, but what did they choose it
against?  As with BASIC before it, and MS-DOS after it, Pascal won out
because it was a kind of software lots of people understood, or thought
they did.