Subj : Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
To   : Dr. What
From : tenser
Date : Sun Jan 14 2024 08:44:53

On 13 Jan 2024 at 10:43a, Dr. What pondered and said...
 
 DW> -=> poindexter FORTRAN wrote to Dr. What <=-
 DW> 
 DW>  pF>  I remember when they "Numerical Recipes in FORTRAN" book became
 DW>  pF>  "Numerical Recipes in C". C seemed like the wrong language for the
 DW>  pF>  higher-level stuff that FORTRAN did well.
 DW> 
 DW> Ya, I remember the same when P.J.'s "Programming Pearls" got a revamp
 DW> into "Programming Pearls for Pascal".

"Programming Pearls" was written by Jon Bentley
(who's father, incidentally, was a Marine at the
Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War).

You may be thinking of, "Software Tools", which was
in ratfor ("Rational FORTRAN" --- a preprocessor that
took a semi-structured language and emitted FORTRAN)
and later translated into Pascal.  That was by Brian
Kernighan and PJ Plauger.  Incidentally, that caused
Kernighan to write is, "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite
Programming Language" paper, which is worth a read: https://lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html

 DW> But as languages evolved, and programmer needs changed, it was important
 DW> that newbys learned good ways of doing things.  Otherwise you end up
 DW> with even more fodder for The Daily WTF.

I think that's an invariant.

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