some reading and listening thats interesting

Niklaus Wirth celebrated his 80th birthday. The Niklaus Wirth
Birthday Symposium, organised by the computer science department
of ETH Zürich, was a celebration of the life and work of Niklaus
Wirth on the occasion of his birthday. Details about the talks
and speakers are available here. The talk of Niklaus Wirth
himself is also available (complete programme).

http://wirth-symposium.ethz.ch/programme.html

Am 14.03.2014 13:10, schrieb dope:
> some reading and listening thats interesting
>
> Niklaus Wirth celebrated his 80th birthday. The Niklaus Wirth
> Birthday Symposium, organised by the computer science department
> of ETH Zürich, was a celebration of the life and work of Niklaus
> Wirth on the occasion of his birthday. Details about the talks
> and speakers are available here. The talk of Niklaus Wirth
> himself is also available (complete programme).
>
> http://wirth-symposium.ethz.ch/programme.html

Adding the discussion I started back on Lambda the Ultimate.

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4894#comment

I am a fan of Wirth's work as he and his peers have proven that is possible to have personal workstations OS done in memory safe systems programming languages (Modula-2, Oberon and their successors)

Sadly the world at large ignored what was happening at ETHZ during the mid 90's and decided to invest in optimizing C compilers instead.

--
Paulo

On 3/14/2014 10:24 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Sadly the world at large ignored what was happening at ETHZ during the mid 90's
> and decided to invest in optimizing C compilers instead.

The shift away from Pascal/Modula2 happened earlier than that. The beginning of the end of Pascal was in 1987 - when Zortech C++ was released.

Why do I say that?

Far and away, the most popular platform for programmers was the PC. Before ZTC++, C++ was unusable on the PC. ZTC++ caught the OOP wave right on the upside, and it was a huge hit on the PC. It was successful enough that Microsoft decided they needed to do a C++ too, as well as causing Borland to turn away from Borland Pascal towards C++.

(One of the big problems with the Pascal family of languages is the code was not portable between platforms, or even between vendors. There was no large library of 32 bit code one could port to the PC. There was with C. C and C++ could compile and run on 16 bit PCs and 32 bit workstations.)

By the time Modula2 came around, the battle was already lost for the Pascal family of languages.

So really, you can arguably assign significant blame on yours truly for the failure of Modula2. (At a software trade show in 89 or 90 or so, one of the compiler devs for Stepstone M2 ruefully told me that he'd "backed the wrong horse".)

So why did I do a C/C++ compiler initially rather than Pascal/M2? Simple - I'd used Pascal in the late 70's, and hated it. I just couldn't get anything done in Pascal, it had too many frustrating restrictions, as well as simply looking ugly on a page. C and me was love at first sight.

Am 14.03.2014 18:38, schrieb Walter Bright:
> On 3/14/2014 10:24 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> Sadly the world at large ignored what was happening at ETHZ during the
>> mid 90's
>> and decided to invest in optimizing C compilers instead.
>
> The shift away from Pascal/Modula2 happened earlier than that. The
> beginning of the end of Pascal was in 1987 - when Zortech C++ was released.
>
> Why do I say that?
>
> Far and away, the most popular platform for programmers was the PC.
> Before ZTC++, C++ was unusable on the PC. ZTC++ caught the OOP wave
> right on the upside, and it was a huge hit on the PC. It was successful
> enough that Microsoft decided they needed to do a C++ too, as well as
> causing Borland to turn away from Borland Pascal towards C++.
>
> (One of the big problems with the Pascal family of languages is the code
> was not portable between platforms, or even between vendors. There was
> no large library of 32 bit code one could port to the PC. There was with
> C. C and C++ could compile and run on 16 bit PCs and 32 bit workstations.)
>
> By the time Modula2 came around, the battle was already lost for the
> Pascal family of languages.
>
> So really, you can arguably assign significant blame on yours truly for
> the failure of Modula2. (At a software trade show in 89 or 90 or so, one
> of the compiler devs for Stepstone M2 ruefully told me that he'd "backed
> the wrong horse".)
>
> So why did I do a C/C++ compiler initially rather than Pascal/M2? Simple
> - I'd used Pascal in the late 70's, and hated it. I just couldn't get
> anything done in Pascal, it had too many frustrating restrictions, as
> well as simply looking ugly on a page. C and me was love at first sight.

Thanks for the historical info. I love this type of stories.

My main problems with C are the safety defaults, implicit conversions and lack of proper modules.

Actually as I mentioned a few times here, I do like C++ and I always stand on the C++ side during the usual C vs C++ wars.

It still has those pesky C safety defaults, but offers safe alternatives, namespaces and OO/generic programming.

However I do recognise that with the recent trends of (finally) having people using static analysers on their code, C can be made a bit safer,
even almost Pascal like.

--
Paulo

Seems an appropriate moment to ask this.... although I'm not aware of any paper by Wirth himself stating this principle.

I'm curious...

You are known for writing "fast" compilers... (ie. compilers that compile
fast)

What do you make of Wirth's "Oberon" criteria for optimization passes?

(ie. The idea that "Optimization passes should pay for themselves" or "compiling the compiler with a version with the new optimization pass should be faster than compiling the smaller / simpler compiler with the less optimized version of the compiled compiler")

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.39.9965

Seems intuitively appealing to me... except somewhere along we end up comparing relative amounts of chalk and cheese...

ie. I think there is a sound mathematical principle down there somewhere.... but I'm not sure it has been properly stated.



On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 6:38 AM, Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com>wrote:

> On 3/14/2014 10:24 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>
>> Sadly the world at large ignored what was happening at ETHZ during the
>> mid 90's
>> and decided to invest in optimizing C compilers instead.
>>
>
> The shift away from Pascal/Modula2 happened earlier than that. The beginning of the end of Pascal was in 1987 - when Zortech C++ was released.
>
> Why do I say that?
>
> Far and away, the most popular platform for programmers was the PC. Before ZTC++, C++ was unusable on the PC. ZTC++ caught the OOP wave right on the upside, and it was a huge hit on the PC. It was successful enough that Microsoft decided they needed to do a C++ too, as well as causing Borland to turn away from Borland Pascal towards C++.
>
> (One of the big problems with the Pascal family of languages is the code was not portable between platforms, or even between vendors. There was no large library of 32 bit code one could port to the PC. There was with C. C and C++ could compile and run on 16 bit PCs and 32 bit workstations.)
>
> By the time Modula2 came around, the battle was already lost for the Pascal family of languages.
>
> So really, you can arguably assign significant blame on yours truly for the failure of Modula2. (At a software trade show in 89 or 90 or so, one of the compiler devs for Stepstone M2 ruefully told me that he'd "backed the wrong horse".)
>
> So why did I do a C/C++ compiler initially rather than Pascal/M2? Simple - I'd used Pascal in the late 70's, and hated it. I just couldn't get anything done in Pascal, it had too many frustrating restrictions, as well as simply looking ugly on a page. C and me was love at first sight.
>



-- 
John Carter
Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639
Tait Electronics
PO Box 1645 Christchurch
New Zealand

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