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Heteroglot: Project Euler problem #16 in Pascal, #17 in Inform 7

by hoverbear on 1/13/16, 1:18 AM with 15 comments

• by to3m on 1/13/16, 11:48 PM

  "How on earth did C win out over this?" - here's some guy's take on, if not exactly this question, matters that may be related: https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html

  My own memory is similar - Pascal was just generally annoying to use, in various little ways, that added up over time. On the face of it, it seems like it should be a lot better than C, but in practice... it just wasn't.

• by asQuirreL on 1/13/16, 11:34 PM

  > Cool. I’m glad to see Pascal has adopted Rust’s approach of putting the type last, so you can actually see at a glance what the variable names are.

  I'm guessing (hoping) this is irony...

• by AnimalMuppet on 1/14/16, 1:49 AM

  > I have a hard time even thinking of it as a systems language, since systems languages tend to be full of punctuation, whereas Pascal makes pretty heavy use of keywords.

  Judging whether it's a systems language by keywords vs punctuations? Seriously?

  > does this seriously predate C and share the same problem space?

  Some people thought it could share the same problem space, but it was primarily intended to be a teaching language. It turned out that it wasn't as suited for real work as some people thought.

  > Granted, I don’t know enough about Pascal from one toy program to fairly compare it to C. Kind of curious what the story is, though.

  The story is, when you quit having toy problems, Pascal's limitations got in your way much more than C's limitations did.