🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <l6rs6cINN8fh@priddy.cs.utexas.edu> woody@cs.utexas.edu (James Woodgate) writes:
>For the record, at the ACM programming contest a couple of semesters
>ago, at UT, I think the top 5 teams wrote their programs in Pascal,
>but I have a feeling they chose TP because of it's incredibly fast
>compile time, most of the people there program in C normally.
>
>I think just about every language has it's place, and I've never
>beleived that there is or should be an "Absolute" best language
>for everything, after all isn't that what Ada was supposed to be???

I'm a graduate of UM-Rolla.  I started there in '84, and that was the first
year that they started teaching Pascal as the first Comp Sci class.  Before
that, they taught Fortran (as far as I know, the engineers still take Fortran).
At the same time, Turbo Pascal 1.0 came out.  It was the first affordable
compiler (under $40 then) I'd ever seen on a PC, and its integrated environment
was absolutely revolutionary.  The compilation-time was incredible (thus it's
name - Turbo Pascal).  And executation-time was equally amazing to people who
were used to BASIC.  Before we came along, students at UMR had to do almost
everything on the IBM mainframe, and everything was batch.  Sometimes it took
hours to compile a program on the mainframe.  Now everybody uses compilers
instead of interpretters, so it becomes apparent that Turbo Pascal sacrifices
some execution speed in order to compile faster.  Consequently, some people
seem to think that Pascal inherently produces slow code.  That's not true at
all.  A good 2-pass optimizing Pascal compiler can produce very fast code.
But that just wasn't an issue when Turbo Pascal was first conceived.