🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Sep21.220031.19274@sj.ate.slb.com>, poffen@sj.ate.slb.com (Russell Poffenberger) writes:
> But pascal was never intended to be a "useful" language. It was developed as
> an aid in teaching structured programming. C is much more accepted as an
> industry standard for software programming than pascal.
> 
Turbo Pascal is definately a "useful" language, whatever the original Pascal
was designed to be. There are, as everyone points out, pros and cons with both;
Pascal's greatest advantage is that it is understandable, to the point that, if
a program has no syntax errors then it has a *much* lower chance of logical
errors than a C program - therefore it is best for beginners, prototyping, and
high-reliability software. It is too easy in C to write a program that the
compiler accepts, but contains a punctuation or pointer error which makes the
execution go wrong. My favoutrite policy is to write major programs first in
Turbo Pascal, let them go through several patches, then rewrite the program in
C. This sounds like a lot of work, but it is good policy for programs to
undergo a major re-write after the simplicity of the original has been spoilt
but a history of hurried patches.

Mark Aitchison, Physics, University of Canterbury, New Zealand.