And with it we landed in a world full of buffer overruns and memory errors exploits.

Sure Pascal was a bit of a pain sometimes to use, but it did promote safety.

Now we have to fight an uphill battle with C developers to make them realize
the benefict
of using safer languages while fixing security holes every day.

--
Paulo

"Walter Bright" <newshound2@digitalmars.com> wrote in message news:ia22e1$1upn$1@digitalmars.com...
> Russel Winder wrote:
>> Pascal was never really intended as a production language, it was intended for teaching programming and the abstract concepts behind programming.  I suggest that in the period 1972-82 it achieved its goals admirably.  From 1984 onwards it was clearly becoming insufficient for the task and things moved on.
>>
>> Most of the commercial Pascal varieties tried to be variants on Modula-2 but labelled themselves Pascal, and here lie the real problems and the hassles that led to Pascal ending up with a bad name -- one it should not be landed with in perpituity.
>
> I think Pascal did a good job of promoting "structured programming", the buzzword of the 70's.
>
> "User Friendly" was the buzzword of the 80s.
>
> "Object Oriented" for the 90s.
>
> "Generic" for the 00s.
>
> "Functional" for the teens, I suppose. Too soon to tell.
>
> I'm less forgiving of Pascal than you are. I have the original PUM&R, and yes, it was designed as a teaching language. But still, a teaching language shouldn't be so awfully crippled and with such huge mistakes (array handling).
>
> Modula-2 failed because by the time it appeared, everyone fed up with Pascal's failings had moved to C (and then C++). I remember a Modula-2 vendor telling me in the late 80's that they'd screwed up and backed the wrong horse, they should have gone with C++.
>
> Modula-2 also screwed up by not calling itself Pascal-2.
>
> I used OMSI Pascal in 1978 or so, I don't think it was related to Modula-2. Naturally, it had extensions, too. Pascal is unusable without extensions, even for simple programs.
>
> Pascal annoyed me so much, and C was *so* much better, I never gave M2 a serious look. Consider this: C today is still a dominant language, and is largely unchanged from the early 80's. But Pascal evolved into Modula, Modula 2, Oberon, Delphi, Object Pascal, etc., always trying to find a workable combination of features. Meanwhile, the world passed it by.

Paulo Pinto:

> Now we have to fight an uphill battle with C developers to make them realize
> the benefict
> of using safer languages while fixing security holes every day.

See bugs from integer overflows, for example.
A "battle" that I'm willing to "fight" every day :-)

D is a bit better than C in this regard, if you write a short program in C and then you write a similar program in D, you will probably put quite less bugs in the D version (I think in C# you put a bit less bugs than D, because the C# compiler is a little more strict).

Bye,
bearophile

"If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming  must be the process of putting them in." -- Edsger W. Dijkstra