🚀 go-pugleaf

lr-lang@csm.uwe.ac.uk (Bob Lang 3P21 x3172) writes:

>In article <dformosa.814490666@lancelot.st.nepean.uws.edu.au>, dformosa@isoulte.st.nepean.uws.edu.au (David Formosa) writes:
>> jmartin@cs.ucla.edu (Jay Martin) writes:
>> 
>> >najork@pa.dec.com (Marc Najork) writes:
>> 
>> >First, Pascal is a ancient joke, you can't really do anything real in
>> >it today and in my opinion those schools that teach it are too
>> >bleeping lazy to change CS1 to a practical language.  
>> 	Pascal was deloped as and should be used as a teaching language.  

>CRAP!   I worked for many years as a software engineer in the UK, working
>mainly in Pascal. 

Its incredible when someone give past successes as proof that old
technology is now somehow great.  The club was great for cavemen,
nuclear weapons are better.  VMS was better ergonomically than Unix
and successful and it was written in assembly (which eventually
killed it).  Success does not always mean technical competency.

Pascal is old, its syntax is crudy, its features are limited, there is
no decent standard (unless you elect Borland/Turbo/Delphi to be the
standard).  Wirth went on to Modula2 like 15 years ago.  Theres also
Modula3, Ada, Eiffel, etc which build on it and correct its flaws.
There is no reason in my opinion to teach Pascal in Computer Science
in place of its progeny besides lazyness.

Welcome to todays mental boxing match in the CS students's head: In
one corner is the dominating champion C/C++, in the opposite corner
representing imperitive type-safe readable software-engineered
languages is the venerable (gulp) standard Pascal.

Jay