![]() I used Fortran with type-safety and bounds checking: we just switched to the other compiler when we wanted something smaller and faster. Compared to the other languages at the time (BASIC, Fortran, Lisp, C, Forth, and a few others), Pascal was extremely inefficient. Of course, Pascal itself had the same relationship to Algol, so it was just continuing the trend.Īs for why it wasn't use commercially, the short answer is performance. There were several attempts to make Pascal more commercially viable, but with every attempt, they ended up needing to make certain tweaks to the syntax ot meet the performance goals, at which point it wasn't Pascal anymore, it was Modula 2, or Modula 3, or even Ada. However, the Pascal version required 50% more memory to run (at a time when memory was very expensive) and was about 30% slower. ![]() The Pascal code was much easier to follow, the logic flow was cleaner, and it would have been a lot easier to maintain than the C version, which was doing address arithmetic and never checking array bounds. I did some timing tests once of an application that had been written (very elegantly, I might add) in Microsoft Pascal for the PC, to a hacked version that had been written in Microsoft C (this was at the time when Microsoft C was just rebranded Lattice C). In an education setting, performance is less important that the ability to teach the concepts. ![]() It was great to teach concepts, but doing type-safe checking in the compiler, rather than relying on the developer to do it, resulted in lots of processor time spent on bounds checking and other things that the other language compilers simply didn't do. I'm not sure what school you went to, but when I was learning Pascal, it was not done in an IDE, and we did compile binary executables.Īs for why it wasn't use commercially, the short answer is performance. They only break new ground in the sense that they ought to be buried. If you wonder what a lack of competition brings, just look at the resources Windows 11 needs, and the UX of Microsoft applications in general. The joy of simple text files.īorland, like IBM at the time, embarrassed Microsoft multiple times by not only making more usable interfaces but also showing that Microsoft's compilers were hopelessly inefficient - both Borland and IBM recompiled Windows and produced more compact and far faster executing code and also faster executing software in general, so obviously both had to go. Enter Turbo Pascal, and after some buffer tweaking it munched through the reports so quickly I executed it twice as I thought it had not run (checking the output would have been the smart move, but it surprised me). ![]() I was already using Borland's Paradox DB and its language PAL (Paradox Appliction Language ) as I didn't get on with DBASE and I needed to write some glue code to translate reports dumped from the VAX into something that Paradox could import as its reporting was far more slick and simpler to set up than I ever hoped to cobble together. I sort of wandered in sideways from all of that after starting with programming on an PSION Organiser II where the programming language was a bit of a blend of Basic and Pascal, including the need for 'compiling' it to an interim code, and a bit of machine code hacking to make OPL (Organiser Programming Language - from the days of naming things as they were - take that, Microsoft Entrails, sorry, Entra) do things that weren't in the manual - and yes, I did that manually, I only learned about assembler later - I was just making things work the way *I* wanted them to work :) ).
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