[fpc-other]reputation of Pascal

[Johann Glaser]

Hi!

Am Die, 2002-06-04 um 13.14 schrieb Rainer Hantsch:
[ ... ]

You speak out of my heart.

I have to use plain C sometimes, so I managed to work with it. I've even
written a few programs/modules without a curse! *beingproudofme* ;-)

Then I thought, ok, C isn't that bad, except the few dirty things. But
soon in a lecture on our university ("digital signal processing with C")
I learnd to hate it again. Pointers are so silly in C. And everybody has
to learn how they work right at the beginning, because nothing works
without pointers.

My father told my, that all C programmers are so proud of the pointer
capabilities of C. Yes, sure, they've never seen anything else. When
learning Pascal, there was no need, because you only need pointers for
enhanced problems. But they switched to C before they came to use
pointers in Pascal. Then they saw pointers in C and, wow, pointers!

But types in C are more ugly too. You can't declare a PInteger as a
pointer to an Integer. You have to use the star '*' every now and then.
My professor said (laughing) he only needed three (3) stars in series at
most! Can you imagine? (int ***matrix) ??? Pfui! No self defined types?

The problem on Pascal's reputation is it's reputation. If you come
somewhere and tell them, you are a good Pascal programmer, eeeverybudy
will set up a smile! Most Pascal programmers don't even dare to say they
use Pascal! Pascal's reputation is so bad, because it's not publicly
known what Pascal can do. Most people learnd programming with Pascal.
Then, when they got a bit of the clue, they had to switch to C. And then
they think, Pascal is only able to do simple things. And perhaps they
have bad memories on Pascal (which comes from their inability to program
in the beginning, not from Pascal, but they project it onto). And,
nowadays it's cool to speak bad about Pascal. This kind of selfdefined
cool guys, which let me define the word "cool" as something very bad.
:-)

Bye
  Hansi

-- 
Johann Glaser   <Johann.Glaser@gmx.at>
   Vienna University of Technology
       Electrical Engineering 
____ http://www.johann-glaser.at/ ____