Nice tools! For those wondering why there’s a custom Pascal dialect: every real-world Pascal was a dialect, it seemed. Pascal was designed as a teaching language so it was missing a lot of things you’d need for Real Programming, esp. at the system level, but it became popular on microcomputers earlier than C for some reason. Maybe the nastiness of pre-ANSI C was part of it. So everyone who implemented Pascal added their own extensions to make it more useful, with no standardization.
(I used UCSD Pascal a bit in high school, then spent several years in college with HP’s extended version of it on 9836 workstations (which had great features like modules and exceptions), then went to Apple’s Object Pascal. Ironically by the time I got to Apple in 1991 everything was being moved to C and C++.)
Thanks for the comment. Yes, it’s amazing when and why so many projects switched away from Pascal and its descendants. Many innovations that we still use today are associated with Pascal. Even Microsoft had their own Pascal compiler. However, Pascal also had various quirks (unnecessary ‘begin’, dangling else, etc.), and Wirth had apparently reacted too hesitantly and too late to the development of the “market needs”. So people helped themselves and as a result the community fragmented into countless, incompatible parallel paths - a development that has repeated itself with all Wirth languages. Or maybe we should rather assume that this is the “normal” development of a language and we should wonder how and why e.g. C++, Java or Python managed to stay as standard for so long.
Nice tools! For those wondering why there’s a custom Pascal dialect: every real-world Pascal was a dialect, it seemed. Pascal was designed as a teaching language so it was missing a lot of things you’d need for Real Programming, esp. at the system level, but it became popular on microcomputers earlier than C for some reason. Maybe the nastiness of pre-ANSI C was part of it. So everyone who implemented Pascal added their own extensions to make it more useful, with no standardization.
(I used UCSD Pascal a bit in high school, then spent several years in college with HP’s extended version of it on 9836 workstations (which had great features like modules and exceptions), then went to Apple’s Object Pascal. Ironically by the time I got to Apple in 1991 everything was being moved to C and C++.)
Thanks for the comment. Yes, it’s amazing when and why so many projects switched away from Pascal and its descendants. Many innovations that we still use today are associated with Pascal. Even Microsoft had their own Pascal compiler. However, Pascal also had various quirks (unnecessary ‘begin’, dangling else, etc.), and Wirth had apparently reacted too hesitantly and too late to the development of the “market needs”. So people helped themselves and as a result the community fragmented into countless, incompatible parallel paths - a development that has repeated itself with all Wirth languages. Or maybe we should rather assume that this is the “normal” development of a language and we should wonder how and why e.g. C++, Java or Python managed to stay as standard for so long.