An Algol-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600
around 1967--68 as an instructional tool for elementary programming.
This language, designed primarily to keep students from shooting
themselves in the foot and thus extremely restrictive from a
general-purpose-programming point of view, was later promoted as a
general-purpose tool and, in fact, became the ancestor of a large
family of languages including Modula-2 and Ada (see also
{bondage-and-discipline language}). The hackish point of view on
Pascal was probably best summed up by a devastating (and, in its
deadpan way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of
{K&R} fame) entitled Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming
Language, which was turned down by the technical journals but
circulated widely via photocopies. It was eventually published in
Comparing and Assessing Programming Languages, edited by Alan Feuer
and Narain Gehani (Prentice-Hall, 1984). Part of his discussion is
worth repeating here, because its criticisms are still apposite to
Pascal itself after many years of improvement and could also stand as
an indictment of many other bondage-and-discipline languages. (The
entire essay is available at
http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html.) At the end of a
summary of the case against Pascal, Kernighan wrote:
9. There is no escape
This last point is perhaps the most important. The language is
inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape
its limitations. There are no casts to disable the type-checking
when necessary. There is no way to replace the defective run-time
environment with a sensible one, unless one controls the compiler
that defines the "standard procedures". The language is closed.
People who use Pascal for serious programming fall into a fatal
trap. Because the language is impotent, it must be extended. But
each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look
like whatever language they really want. Extensions for separate
compilation, FORTRAN-like COMMON, string data types, internal
static variables, initialization, octal numbers, bit operators,
etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but
destroy its portability to others.
I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for anything much beyond
its original target. In its pure form, Pascal is a toy language,
suitable for teaching but not for real programming.
Pascal has since been entirely displaced (mainly by {C}) from the
niches it had acquired in serious applications and systems
programming, and from its role as a teaching language by Java.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {BASIC}{bondage-and-discipline language}{holy wars}{If you want X, you know where to find it.}{Java}{languages of choice}{toy language}]