[mavelikara]

In an essay titled "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language" Brian W. Kernighan wrote:

<quote> The size of an array is part of its type

If one declares

     var     arr10 : array [1..10] of integer;
             arr20 : array [1..20] of integer;

then arr10 and arr20 are arrays of 10 and 20 integers respectively. Suppose we want to write a procedure 'sort' to sort an integer array. Because arr10 and arr20 have different types, it is not possible to write a single procedure that will sort them both.

The place where this affects Software Tools particularly, and I think programs in general, is that it makes it difficult indeed to create a library of routines for doing common, general-purpose operations like sorting. </quote>

Kernighan was one of the early C/Unix developers from Bell Labs. It is amusing to note that Go, whose authors come from the same background, getting criticized for something very similar.

[1]: http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html