Re: pascal system

["mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

John B. Matthews wrote:

> I see; this may be two sides of the same coin. The lack of genericity in
> Pascal prompted a variety of (incompatible) schemes including UNIV type
> parameters and type-risky pointer schemes.

Yes. It also prompted a massive rise in the popularity of languages
such as C that had no such limitations due to the weaker typing, and
caused a misconception that strongly typed languages provide undue
restriction upon the programmer. It was certainly true that Pascal did
this, but the problem was solved in 1983 when Ada first appeared.

Unfortunately, this attitude continues to this very day, despite the
fact that many languages have come along since that provide all the
flexibility without compromising the safety. Ada did this rather well.
Java does an OK job but lacks constraints on primitive types.

These days I find myself more and more using very unconstrained
languages, like Ruby, and relying on test harnesses to validate
behavior. I find this is actually a more productive solution than
relying on compile time checking. After all, compile time checking only
validates that the program is syntactically correct, not that it will
do what you thought it was going to :-)

> Indeed! On a whim I ported some UCSD code to Kyan and FPC (a TP
> descendant). I was amazed both that it was so hard and that it worked at
> all:-)

Yeah - it was a big problem unil the Borland definition of Pascal
became the defacto standard, but by then I was using better languages.

Matt