art@buengc.BU.EDU (A. R. Thompson) (06/15/89)
Can somebody post a report on the status of the IEEE/ANSI Extended Pascal Standard, due out any day now(?). Where can I obtain a copy? /Al Thompson
sakkinen@tukki.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen) (10/27/89)
In article <41232@bu-cs.BU.EDU> art@cs.bu.edu (Al Thompson) writes: >There is a new standard for Extended Pascal that should be out soon. This >group is read by members of the Joint Pascal Standard Committee (X3/J9). >Perhaps one of them would be kind enough to enlighten us as to the current >state of affairs. > No, I am not one of them, just a satisfied customer :-). More exactly, it's the Joint ANSI X3J9 / IEEE P770 Pascal Standards Committee, chaired by Thomas N. Turba from Unisys. One of the committee members, David Joslin, has written several times about the proposed extensions in ACM SIGPLAN Notices during the last 2 - 3 years. There have been some other articles about Extended Pascal, too, in the same journal. The newest "Working Draft : Programming Language Extended Pascal" is dated August 18, 1989 and has xiv + 241 pages, so it _is_ extended. I have sent a couple of comments to the committee, and they really seem to have handled all public comments meticulously. (The difference between their responses and the comments one gets e.g. about a conference paper from the reviewers is enormous.) On the other hand: In article <SCHWARTZ.89Oct26164108@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu> schwartz@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz) writes (_not_ referring the above!): > ... > [...] Let pascal be pascal, and use something else if >you want something else. > >Go read "Object Oriented Software Construction" by Bertrand Meyer to >see what a modern language looks like. He designed Eiffel to be clean >and complete, and not built out of ad-hoc experimental extensions. >Very much in the spirit of pascal as conceived by Wirth. It is really an open question whether an extended Pascal has a future, since we have so many good newer languages. I agree with Scott Schwarz about Eiffel. Concerning Wirth, I think his newest language, Oberon, is regress rather than progress: if one tries to remove all features that are known to be misused by some programmers, one ends up with a language much too Spartan for the good programmers. And even then, as many people have pointed out, it is impossible to prevent bad programmers from writing bad code. Markku Sakkinen Department of Computer Science University of Jyvaskyla (a's with umlauts) Seminaarinkatu 15 SF-40100 Jyvaskyla (umlauts again) Finland
jds@mimsy.umd.edu (James da Silva) (10/28/89)
In article <1845@tukki.jyu.fi> sakkinen@jytko.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen) SAKKINEN@FINJYU.bitnet (alternative) writes: > >The newest "Working Draft : Programming Language Extended Pascal" >is dated August 18, 1989 and has xiv + 241 pages, so it _is_ extended. Do you (or anyone) have a summary of what has changed since the June 29, 1988 Draft? Presumably they are at the point where they are just doing editorial cleanups, not major changes to the semantics? Thanks, Jaime ........................................................................... : domain: jds@cs.umd.edu James da Silva : path: uunet!mimsy!jds
sakkinen@tukki.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen) (10/30/89)
In article <20438@mimsy.umd.edu> jds@mimsy.umd.edu (James da Silva) writes: >In article <1845@tukki.jyu.fi> sakkinen@jytko.jyu.fi (Markku Sakkinen) >SAKKINEN@FINJYU.bitnet (alternative) writes: >> >>The newest "Working Draft : Programming Language Extended Pascal" >>is dated August 18, 1989 and has xiv + 241 pages, so it _is_ extended. > >Do you (or anyone) have a summary of what has changed since the June 29, >1988 Draft? Presumably they are at the point where they are just doing >editorial cleanups, not major changes to the semantics? Your assumption is probably not far from the truth, but let's hope some committee member gives a better answer. Even the compact list of new features added to the 1983 ANSI/IEEE standard takes only 4 pages in the Foreword of the new draft. Somebody has asked me by e-mail where one can get the draft. In the USA, you could probably write to: ANSI X3 Secretariat c/o CBEMA 311 First Street, N.W., Suite 500 Washington, DC 20001-2178 Be prepared to pay for it. In other countries, the place to start asking is the national standards organisation. That's where I got my copy of the 1988 draft. (At least that one was co-published by the British Standards Institution). Markku Sakkinen Department of Computer Science University of Jyvaskyla (a's with umlauts) Seminaarinkatu 15 SF-40100 Jyvaskyla (umlauts again) Finland