Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.smalltalk,comp.object
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!satisfied.elf.com!news.mathworks.com!uunet!allegra!alice!ark
From: ark@research.att.com (Andrew Koenig)
Subject: Re: C+@ vs C++ Was C++ Productivity
Message-ID: <D3DLsn.I07@research.att.com>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ
References: <1995Jan31.135658.8613@rcmcon.com> <jim.fleming.116.0005C923@bytes.com> <nagleD3Cq9M.1Mn@netcom.com>
Date: Thu, 2 Feb 1995 14:05:11 GMT
Lines: 26
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.c++:110510 comp.lang.smalltalk:20235 comp.object:25981

In article <nagleD3Cq9M.1Mn@netcom.com> nagle@netcom.com (John Nagle) writes:

>       It's really hard to promote a single-vendor language, unless
> you're as big as Microsoft.  Remember Actor?  Neon?  Prograph?  Mesa?
> The demise of the whole Pascal/Modula family is harder to explain,
> since those languages had a solid track record of good software
> implemented in them.

I think it's easy to explain:  Pascal didn't offer a usable way
to do something even as simple as sorting an array.  Because the
size of an array is part of its type in original Pascal, the best
one could do was to write a procedure that would sort an array of
a single particular size.

This was obviously unacceptable for serious work of any kind, so
to make Pascal usable it was necessary to extend it.  Because
Worth did not want to extend the language in that manner, every
compiler vendor did so and did it differently.  Thus Pascal became
a zillion different dialects and people started using C instead.

This bit of history, by the way, is part of the reason the C++ 
standards committee has been relatively liberal about accepting
requests for language extensions -- at least when compared with C.
-- 
				--Andrew Koenig
				  ark@research.att.com
