Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!sun-barr!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!tektronix!percival!bucket!leonard
From: leonard@bucket.UUCP (Leonard Erickson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Where are the pascal jobs?
Message-ID: <1396@bucket.UUCP>
Date: 14 May 89 05:58:50 GMT
References: <May.11.21.48.07.1989.11277@galaxy.rutgers.edu>
Reply-To: leonard@bucket.UUCP (Leonard Erickson)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Rick's Home Grown Unix; Portland, OR
Lines: 33

In article <May.11.21.48.07.1989.11277@galaxy.rutgers.edu> wjones@andromeda (the ronin) writes:
<
<	I was wondering .. Do any companys in the real world actually use
<	pascal in programming.

I'm responsible for a system of programs that our QA department uses.
Around a megabyte of Turbo Pascal source. At the time it was originally
set up, they had 3 choices. 

BASIC (Microsoft BASCOM 2.0)
C     (Microsoft C 1.0?)
Pascal (Turbo Pascal 3.0)

They picked Pascal as it was the easiest to maintain (in the sense of
being able to drop it into someone's lap and have any hope that they
could get up to speed quickly). Unfortunately, the guy who did the
original coding was a COBOL programmer and wasn't too familiar with
Pascal. So I've been fighting things like 12 *page* procedures for the
last four years.

Now they want a massive number of improvements all at once and they 
realize that I can't have it done in the time allotted (partly because
I'm lucky to be able to spend 5-10% of my time on coding, due to staff
shortages in Micro support) So they've turned it over to the regular DP
people who are going write a new set of programs and run them on the
VAX. <sigh> (and the users actually think that they'll be able to get
changes implemented faster this way... :-)

-- 
Leonard Erickson		...!tektronix!reed!percival!bucket!leonard
CIS: [70465,203]
"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools.
Let's start with typewriters." -- Solomon Short