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From: house@helios.usq.EDU.AU (ron house)
Subject: Re: C+@ vs C++ Was C++ Productivity
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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.

WHen the extended Pascal standard was being planned, a lot of people
were still willing to give Pascal a further try. But the committee
did heaps of good work, but blew it with some pedantic and bad
decisions. I argued, among other things, for a standard =valent of
C's #include. No dice. I received a long transcript of a committee
discussion arguing about the minutae of the brief they had to
produce the new standard. The killer was the argument: But the
filenames will be in a nonstandard format. For heaven's sake! That
was the argument the Algol-60 committee used about i-o, and they
killed Algol-60 with that bad decision. So the Pascal c'tee
repeated the error. There was a small list of things people
seemed generally agreeed on: a few development facilities (e.g.
include filename) and fixing up the operator precedence were the
main ones. By insisting on 'purity' and absolute upward-compatibility
- even when only pathological programs would be affected - they
killed Pascal. It was dead within a year of the extended standard
definition being released. People moved to C because, at least if
they took care, they could get their work done.

--

Ron House.         USQ                   | A nonviolent diet is the
(house@usq.edu.au) Toowoomba, Australia. | foundation for a nonviolent world.
