[klodolph]

I think this was a reason for C’s success back in the day. If C compilers were a little cheaper and easier to get, then they’d completely take over, long-term.

I remember that Pascal was the norm for Mac programming for a time during the late 1980s or so. You could use THINK Pascal (later Symantec) or MPW Pascal. Pretty soon everyone was programming in C and compiling their programs with Metrowerks CodeWarrior.

[narag]

I think this was a reason for C’s success back in the day.

Nop, more like the other way around in the 80's. Before, there were two reasons: lack of a standard (Pascal was a learning language, not intended for professional use) and the VM fever: very often so-called P-Code systems were the quick and dirty way to have a programming language for a new system. The result was slow, incompatible, cumbersome access to machine resources.

C was always compiled and had a clear standard that included direct memory access. Also UNIX.

But in the 80s, TurboPascal was $50, had everything that C had + an IDE + compiled x100 faster. Later there was a nice text-mode GUI (TurboVision), then Delphi. Microsoft defused it poaching most Borland talent.

[dragonwriter]

> lack of a standard (Pascal was a learning language, not intended for professional use)

The parenthetical is correct, what is outside is not; Pascal had a standard (ISO 7185:1983), but the standard lacks features needed for serious use, so Pascal implementations were either standard and hobbled or useful but not interoperable.

[narag]

Pascal had a standard (ISO 7185:1983)

Doesn't "1983" tell you something?

I don't mean to snark. Maybe my comment wasn't clear enough. I've talked of two different periods: the first in the seventies, the second in the eighties and later. The starndar was late. By that time, it wasn't needed because the only Pascal that was widely used was Borland's.

[dragonwriter]

> Doesn't "1983" tell you something?

That it was finalized around the same time Turbo Pascal 1.0, which only ran on DOS and CP/M, was released.

> The starndard was late. By that time, it wasn't needed because the only Pascal that was widely used was Borland's.

The ISO standard closely followed the 1974 language description, which served largely the same purpose and had generally the same shortcomings on utility, so that the “interoperable but not useful because following a very limited common description, or useful but not interoperable because of proprietary extensions on top of the common description” predates the ISO standard; the lack of a common labguage spec was never as much of a problem as the focus of the spec.

And, no, by December 1983, Turbo Pascal (released the month before) was not the only Pascal that mattered. Nor would it be later in the 1980s, as Apple's Object Pascal (which influenced later versions of Turbo Pascal) became important.