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by kristopolous 906 days ago
It's not wrong.

I stand by exactly what I said.

In practice, it was taught as an introduction to programming.

For a decade or two, children learned Basic and highschool/JC aged kids learned Pascal.

Of course they aren't the same thing. It'd be like saying kids ride tricycles and then bicycles and clapping back about penny farthings, velocipedes and dandy horses while tricycles started as a wheelchair device.

Give me a break. The point was Pascal is accessible and easy to learn.

I've met both Kurtz and Wirth and I'm sure they wouldn't have a problem with this.

1 comments

>"It's not wrong."

I think the post you are replying to got it exactly right. IMO your post got it all wrong.

>"I've met both Kurtz and Wirth and I'm sure they wouldn't have a problem with this."

Modern Delphi/FreePascal and the one created by Wirth are very different. I would not call it the same language. And what you "sure they wouldn't" is totally irrelevant.

From the perspective of the learner, the actual cognitive work to get to mastery is of a similar order of magnitude and similar nature. The feature crossover is probably 80-90% depending on how you choose to enumerate them.

The question was about that, specifically, not about the history, not about the nuanced details of who created it, but about how hard it was to pick up.

Specifically "Any recommendations on how to learn it"

It's not in the class of R, FORTH, assembly or Haskell. It's not like Erlang. It's as conceptually approachable as Basic and historically was taught after Basic to tens of millions of people over the course of two decades, in that order.

>"The feature crossover is probably 80-90%"

It is not.

>"assembly "

It has assembly built in.