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by AnimalMuppet 3806 days ago
> 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.
2 comments
nickpsecurity 3806 days ago
So Jurg and Wirth designed Modula-2 as a replacement, then built a computer, then wrote an OS, wrote some apps, and lived happily ever after. Until their urge to build new languages was overpowering. Rinse, repeat.

Yet, Modula-2 had a nice combo of readability, safety, compiler efficiency, and runtime-efficiency. Proven in OS development. Such safe, systems languages helped once I got past toy problems C could handle without crashing my stuff. ;)

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TimJYoung 3806 days ago
I don't know which Pascal you're referring to, but with the modern Object Pascal (that's been around since the mid-90's), I've written two SQL database engines and a web development IDE/compiler.

AFAIK, this was also written in Object Pascal:

https://www.image-line.com/flstudio/

These products are hardly "toys".

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