Subj : Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
To   : Dr. What
From : tenser
Date : Tue Jan 16 2024 06:15:10

On 14 Jan 2024 at 11:13a, Dr. What pondered and said...
 
 DW> -=> tenser wrote to Dr. What <=-
 DW> 
 DW>  te> "Programming Pearls" was written by Jon Bentley
 DW>  te> (who's father, incidentally, was a Marine at the
 DW>  te> Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War).
 DW> 
 DW>  te> You may be thinking of, "Software Tools", which was
 DW>  te> in ratfor ("Rational FORTRAN" --- a preprocessor that
 DW>  te> took a semi-structured language and emitted FORTRAN)
 DW>  te> and later translated into Pascal.
 DW> 
 DW> You are correct.  I got them mixed.
 DW> 
 DW> I used to read "Programming Pearls" in the back issues of the Journal of
 DW> the ACM back in college and had picked up the book.  Sadly, I let it go
 DW> a long time ago.

I think you meant Communications of the ACM; JACM is mostly
theory.  :-)

 DW> I discovered "Software Tools" shortly after that (which is probably why
 DW> I got them mixed) and read that one cover to cover.  I think I even did
 DW> some of the code in Pascal (before "Software Tools in Pascal" came out)
 DW> as an exercise.
 DW> 
 DW>  te> That was by Brian
 DW>  te> Kernighan and PJ Plauger.  Incidentally, that caused
 DW>  te> Kernighan to write is, "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite
 DW>  te> Programming Language" paper, which is worth a read:
 DW>  te> https://lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html
 DW> 
 DW> I vaguely remember reading that a long time ago.  PJ is right on his
 DW> with his criticism of Pascal. 

Bwk, but yeah.  One of the problems was that they were
working in the context of standard Pascal, so they didn't
have some of the nice-ities that say Turbo Pascal brought
to the language (like a string type).  It would have been
interesting to see a version of Software Tools in e.g.
Oberon.

 DW> But as he notes at the beginning
 DW> "Comparing C and Pascal is rather like comparing a Learjet to a Piper
 DW> Cub - one is meant for getting something done while the other is meant
 DW> for learning - so such comparisons tend to be somewhat farfetched."
 DW> 
 DW> My college profs were always clear: We are doing stuff in Pascal to
 DW> teach you good habits.  You won't use Pascal in the "real world", but
 DW> the good habits you pick up doing everything in Pascal will serve you
 DW> well.  And they were (pretty much) right.

Agreed.  Pascal was useful for teaching structured programming
concepts, which for a lot of students was novel; either they
had no prior experience programming at all or had learned BASIC
(and quite possibly a bunch of bad habits) and needed a reset.
But in the form it was usually taught, it wasn't a language I'd
really want to have to write a lot of software in.  The
extended versions, maybe, but at that point aside from sharing
syntax, it's not the same language.

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