Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!mcvax!ukc!cs.tcd.ie!tcdmath!gwills
From: gwills@maths.tcd.ie (Graham Wills)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Pascal dying out?
Summary: No it isn't
Keywords: Pascal, Macintosh, serious programming
Message-ID: <93@maths.tcd.ie>
Date: 27 Oct 88 12:41:26 GMT
Article-I.D.: maths.93
References: <267@lafcol.UUCP> <9631@swan.ulowell.edu>
Reply-To: gwills@maths.tcd.ie (Graham Wills)
Organization: Maths Dept., Trinity College, Dublin
Lines: 48

In article <9631@swan.ulowell.edu> sbrunnoc@hawk.ulowell.edu (Sean Brunnock) writes:
>
>  I don't believe that Pascal is used much by serious programmers
>developers anymore, thank/blame C for that.

You are wrong. Pascal is still very much used by serious programmers.

I am a Postgrad at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, and a lot of my research 
is associated with programming. I use the Macintosh family of computers, 
especially the Mac II ( and if you are talking about *serious* PCs, then the
Mac II beats most others hollow - especially for easy, speedy graphics, which
is essential for my area of research; Spatial population motion analysis )

I have written a time series package which works with graphic representations,
which uses binary and text data files, can import/export to Excel, multi-
windows, etc., etc. . I have also written simulations, and have acces to a wide
variety of packages written in Pascal.

I have written a Kermit for an obscure Mini in a mixture of C and Fortran, demo
Forth applications, Object-oriented Pascal programs, and as a young and free
hacker, games in Basic, 6502 and Z80 machine code.

Whoops - reading back that reads like a job application letter. It's meant to
demonstrate that I do know what I'm talking about, which is :

1) Pascal is a nice language. It is (and I don't think anyone disagrees with
   this) an ideal language to learn programming with.
2) It is not easy or quick to work with standard Pascal filing methods -
   If you need to do serious work, get libraries. I use the standard Mac 
   routines, so I can load in records, windows, arrays as binary files with
   two or three lines of code, and very quickly. This (and rigorous typing -
   which is annoying) is its worst defect for the serious programmer.
3) C is a much more flexible language (hopefully this is indisputable).
   This is both good and bad. It is good in that more compact, subtle code
   is possible, and bad in that you can write overly subtle, unreadable code.
   For a well-disciplined programmer this is no problem. For most of us, it is.

In summary, I use Pascal happily all the time, hate doing filing using it, but
prefer it because it is very readable, simple and keeps me on the rails as
regards readability, modifiability and structuredness. With C I tend to hack.

These are my personal opinions, and I just threw it in to show that serious
Pascal is alive and well.

All replies welcome. I wear asbestos suits while reading News
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