Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Pascal (Not Just Nickel u0026 Dime) - Computerphile" video.

  1. You didn’t mention Ada, which was an offshoot of Pascal created as the result of a competition held by the US Department of Defense, to create a language suitable for doing systems programming for safety-critical and mission-critical systems. There is still Ada code in use today, for example controlling the life-support systems on the International Space Station (running on Intel 386 processors, with no Microsoft code anywhere in sight).
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  2. 6:19 I remember a description from the time that “pointers are the gotos of data structures”. And guess what: Pascal had gotos as well. Not even restricted gotos: they were a full implementation, including being able to jump out of an inner procedure/function call into an outer one. This was, of course, a way of doing exceptions before languages had the concept of “exceptions”.
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  3. 7:41 UCSD Pascal was very influential. Most of the PC-based implementations were clearly inspired by it (e.g. variable-length strings, “univ” pointers).
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  4. Modula-2.
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  5. Many implementations did “lazy buffering” to get around this. For example, DEC’s VMS compiler (which I liked because of its system-programming extensions).
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  6. 4:14 They went on to create the Free University Compiler Kit. When Richard Stallman was just starting his GNU project, he asked about using their code to build his GNU C compiler. They somewhat facetiously replied that, while the University might be Free, the Compiler Kit certainly wasn’t. So Stallman had to go off and create his own codebase for GCC from scratch. And the rest, as they say, is history. Does anybody still remember the Free University Compiler Kit?
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  7. I used MPW for many years, with a few different languages. I never understood why other programmers preferred those more limited IDE thingies ...
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  8. 11:28 Ahem Unchecked variants, anybody?
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