gjditchfield@violet.waterloo.edu (Glen Ditchfield) (11/30/88)
In article <409@ubbpc.UUCP> wgh@ubbpc.UUCP (William G. Hutchison) writes: > I consider Pascal to be a teaching and publication language, not a practical >application language, so I consider it to be a success, *given Wirth's stated >design goals*, not the goals who wanted Pascal to replace FORTRAN, COBOL, or >PL/I. Dr. Wirth certainly did intend that Pascal be a practical application language. The abstract of "The Programming Language Pascal" [Acta Informatica, v1 #1] says In view of its intended usage both as a convenient basis to teach programming and as an efficient tool to write large programs ... "An Assessment of the Programming Language Pascal" [IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, June 1975] starts with a discussion of "reliable software" and ends with the conclusion Instead of relying too much on either antiquated "debugging tools" or on futuristic automatic program verifiers, we should give more emphasis to the systematic construction of programs with languages that facilitate transparent formulation and automatic consistency checks. The language Pascal was designed with exactly these aims.
mac3n@babbage.acc.virginia.edu (Alex Colvin) (12/02/88)
The stated design goals for Pascal changed several times from the first articles in 71 to later articles. They pretty much match the prevalent use at the time. It is probably correct that Pascal was the true sucessor to Algol 60. As to Algol-68, no "serious" language design since has ignored it. Its influence is felt not so much in use as in subsequent languages. I'm thinking of Ada's "elaborations", C's "union"s & "structs" and (pseudo)- regular treatment of pointers, that awful word "pragma". The Informal Introduction was an early instance of hypertext. There was a SIGPLAN article once, "Ignorance of Algol 68 Considered Harmful". Then there's CPL, not to mention ISWIM...