[fpc-devel] Freepascal in microcontrollers

[Vinzent Hoefler]

On Wednesday 27 February 2008 12:33, Daniël Mantione wrote:

> > Too many Ada-features have crept into Pascal over the years. ;)
>
> You can look at it that way, but Ada wasn't the blueprint for Pascal
> extensions.

Well, in the early days, it was quite the other way around, yes. Ada is 
derived (mostly) from Pascal. And other languages had their influences 
(and others later were influenced), too. Even computer languages have 
their Babel tower.

> Some come from C, some from Modula-2, some from Visual 
> Basic. Bitpacking can be considered a "real" Pascal extension, early
> compilers in the eighties could already do it.

Well, Ada's representation clauses also were known in 1983 already. And 
that was after the standardization procedure was through, so they 
surely appeared in the earlier 1979 drafts already. (And no objection 
please, but representation clauses are quite a bit more than just 
bitpacking.)
But as most features of Ada those probably appeared somewhere else 
before, I guess.

But for sure, such types (do they really call it "record" there or is 
that just my imagination?) appeared in C not before 1999. Together with 
other brain dead design decision, this makes (or at least "made") C 
about the worst choice for embedded, low level programming - and yet, 
it is the most successful.


Vinzent.