dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon) (01/16/88)
C is *much* harder to learn than Pascal. Beginners usually get into a lot of trouble with pointers and end up crashing the machine more often than not. Many of these people then shrug it off because they don't think C disciplined enough. On the other side of the coni, many programmers do not like pascal because it is too wordy and restricted. In my experience, however, the better the programmer, the more prone to C he becomes. The semantic structure of C more closely resembles the capabilities of modern microprocessors (read: 80x86, 680x0, uVAX-II), at least when compared to Pascal. This means the compiler can usually optimize the code to the point where hand written assembly wouldn't go much faster. C was originally designed for systems programmers by systems programmers... designed to be fast and efficient. UNIX is written almost entirely in C with only a few hundred lines of assembly. Many microcomputer operating systems are also written in C and assembly now, rather than just assembly. I have no idea why Apple chose Pascal, but it was probably due to programming trends within Apple at the time. As far as style goes: I've seen bad programmers with bad style, bad programmers with good style, good programmers with awful style, and great programmers with great style. This makes it somewhat more difficult to get a team together to do something, but assuming you can pull it off, or work alone, the results are usually much better, and are accomplished much faster than with Pascal. Please note that this admittedly biased and one-sided comparison is between C and Pascal ONLY. I am not taking into account any other language, many of which are better than both C and Pascal in organization, efficiency, and power. -Matt
suhler@im4u.UUCP (Paul A. Suhler) (01/16/88)
In article <8801152323.AA06669@cory.Berkeley.EDU> dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon) writes: >however, the better the programmer, the more prone to C he becomes. The >semantic structure of C more closely resembles the capabilities of modern >microprocessors (read: 80x86, 680x0, uVAX-II), at least when compared to >Pascal... Tony Hoare reportedly remarked that C isn't too bad a language, except for the pdp-11 assembly instructions in it. :-) -- Paul Suhler suhler@im4u.UTEXAS.EDU 512-474-9517/471-3903
fons@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu (01/17/88)
I take it you didn't note that Lightspeed's person on the net said about a couple weeks or so ago that LSC will support the 68020 and 68881 AND have a SYMBOLIC debugger in late febuary or early march with the next release. The question I have is what will be the update policy be for us who bought LSC when we purchased our Mac II (in my case late august last year). Will they give a patch like usual or will we have to pay for it. I of course purchased the compiler with the hope that I would get an upgrade to the 68020 / 68881 support as I bought it for a Mac II. Just curious. Paul Fons FONS@UIUCVMD (BITNET) FONS@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu