Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!eecae!cps3xx!usenet
From: usenet@cps3xx.UUCP (Usenet file owner)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Pascal dying out?
Message-ID: <880@cps3xx.UUCP>
Date: 16 Oct 88 04:52:41 GMT
References: <267@lafcol.UUCP> <641@bbking.KSP.Unisys.COM>
Reply-To: rang@cpswh.cps.msu.edu (Anton Rang)
Organization: Michigan State University, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 38
In-reply-to: rmarks@KSP.Unisys.COM's message of 14 Oct 88 13:41:41 GMT

In article <641@bbking.ksp.unisys.com>, Richard Marks
(rmarks@ksp.unisys.com) writes:
>In article <267@lafcol.UUCP> galvinp@lafcol.UUCP (Galvin Paul ) writes:
>>there is a certain element that seems to think that Pascal is dying out.
>>They say that in 20 years, it will be long gone.
>
> [stuff about the real world and Pascal vs. C deleted]
>
>But face it guys, pascal is really not portable.  How many lines of
>Turbo P do we have that will never get to Unix.  I think pascal was
>really little used, except in college courses, until Borland gave us
>TurboP.  Now that we also have Turbo C and since "c" will run on
>almost any box, "c" will swamp pascal.

  I think there's a point here which should be clarified.  C, as a
*language*, is relatively portable; i.e., if you avoid things like
assuming ints and pointers are the same size, your program will
probably compile correctly on another machine.
  However, no real program is useful without making lots of operating
system calls.  C and UNIX are pretty much inseparable, because they're
both have totally obscure syntax and weird semantics (:-).  However,
the semantics of UNIX system calls differ enough from machine to
machine (and even OS release to OS release) that it's unlikely you can
write a reasonable C application with a nice user interface without
using non-standard features (thus rendering it non-portable).
  You might as well use Pascal with non-standard features (VAX Pascal
is excellent, and UCSD isn't too bad--I haven't used Turbo much, but
some of my friends like it).
  A good article on this is in IEEE CompCon '86, called "The
Portability of UNIX Application Programs And Other Modern Folk Tales."
It isn't even UNIX-bashing!  (Not that there's anything wrong with
that!)
  Just my thoughts....

+----------------------------------+------------------------+
| Anton Rang (grad student)	   | "UNIX: Just Say No!"   |
| Michigan State University	   | rang@cpswh.cps.msu.edu |
+----------------------------------+------------------------+