| I have lingering distain for Pascal, unlike other people here... In 1980 I was a freshman at UCSC, and the professors did not like C. So most classes used UCSD Pascal. While it apparently pioneered some cool ideas, it was not at all ready for industry use. The free function was just a suggestion, it didn't deallocate anything. Arrays were fixed size, and an array of size 80 was a different type than size 255 (and 255 was the maximum). I remember the compiler class where we built a compiler-compiler using Pascal. It was pretty cool that the professor came up with a design that worked, but also quite dumb as we had to pass around a bunch of 255 char arrays. And also insane that we couldn't use the industrial strength tools like C and yacc available on the VAX / UNIX computers... But what about Modulo-2? Well one professor would torture the class, making them use various not-C languages. One year it was PLZ (A PL/I based language created by Zilog Corporation). When I took the class, it was Modulo-2, using a compiler developed at CMU I think. It also implemented free() as a suggestion that did nothing, and had other warts. I was not impressed... I realize that it is unfair complaining about shitty academic implementations, but that's what I lived through. |
The interesting thing to me is that San Diego hosts the supercomputer centre and so there was a sense the engineers there really live in Fortan, did, and do.
(I was in the UK system at the same time as you, and my uni had Wirth on sabbatical for a year, during the ada/modula specification days. We all learned on Pascal on a Dec-10, unless you chose the other door and went LISP. I regret not going in the LISP door now, but hindsight is like that)