Pascal (programming language)

Pascal
Paradigm
Designed by Niklaus Wirth
First appeared 1970 (1970)
Typing discipline
Filename extensions .pp, .pas, .inc,
Major implementations
Dialects
Influenced by
ALGOL W
Influenced

Pascal is a historically influential imperative and procedural programming language, designed in 1968–69 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring.

A derivative known as Object Pascal designed for object-oriented programming was developed in 1985.

History

Pascal, named in honor of the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, was developed by Niklaus Wirth.

Before his work on Pascal, Wirth had developed Euler and ALGOL W and later went on to develop the Pascal-like languages Modula-2 and Oberon.

Initially, Pascal was largely, but not exclusively, intended to teach students structured programming.[4] A generation of students used Pascal as an introductory language in undergraduate courses. Variants of Pascal have also frequently been used for everything from research projects to PC games and embedded systems. Newer Pascal compilers exist which are widely used.[5]

Pascal was the primary high-level language used for development in the Apple Lisa, and in the early years of the Macintosh. Parts of the original Macintosh operating system were hand-translated into Motorola 68000 assembly language from the Pascal sources.[6] The typesetting system TeX by Donald E. Knuth was written in WEB, the original literate programming system, based on DEC PDP-10 Pascal, while applications like Total Commander, Skype and Macromedia Captivate were written in Delphi (Object Pascal).

Object Pascal (Embarcadero Delphi) is still used for developing Windows applications but also has the ability to cross compile the same code to Mac, iOS and Android. Another cross-platform version called Free Pascal, with the Lazarus IDE, is popular with Linux users since it also offers write once, compile anywhere development. CodeTyphon is a Lazarus distribution with more preinstalled packages and cross compilers.

Brief description

Wirth's intention was to create an efficient language (regarding both compilation speed and generated code) based on structured programming, a recently popularized concept that he promoted in his book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. Pascal has its roots in the ALGOL 60 language, but also introduced concepts and mechanisms which (on top of ALGOL's scalars and arrays) enabled programmers to define their own complex (structured) datatypes, and also made it easier to build dynamic and recursive data structures such as lists, trees and graphs. Important features included for this were records, enumerations, subranges, dynamically allocated variables with associated pointers, and sets. To make this possible and meaningful, Pascal has a strong typing on all objects, which means that one type of data cannot be converted or interpreted as another without explicit conversions. Similar mechanisms are standard in many programming languages today. Other languages that influenced Pascal's development were Simula 67, and Wirth's own ALGOL W.

Pascal, like many programming languages of today (but unlike most languages in the C family), allows nested procedure definitions to any level of depth, and also allows most kinds of definitions and declarations inside subroutines (procedures and functions). This enables a very simple and coherent syntax where a complete program is syntactically nearly identical to a single procedure or function (except for the heading, which has one of these three keywords).

Implementations

Early Pascal compilers

The first Pascal compiler was designed in Zürich for the CDC 6000 series mainframe computer family. Niklaus Wirth reports that a first attempt to implement it in Fortran in 1969, was unsuccessful due to Fortran's inadequacy to express complex data structures. The second attempt was formulated in the Pascal language itself and was operational by mid-1970. Many Pascal compilers since have been similarly self-hosting, that is, the compiler is itself written in Pascal, and the compiler is usually capable of recompiling itself when new features are added to the language, or when the compiler is to be ported to a new environment. The GNU Pascal compiler is one notable exception, being written in C.

The first successful port of the CDC Pascal compiler to another mainframe was completed by Welsh and Quinn at the Queen's University of Belfast (QUB) in 1972. The target was the ICL 1900 series. This compiler in turn was the parent of the Pascal compiler for the Information Computer Systems (ICS) Multum minicomputer. The Multum port was developed – with a view to using Pascal as a systems programming language – by Findlay, Cupples, Cavouras and Davis, working at the Department of Computing Science in Glasgow University. It is thought that Multum Pascal, which was completed in the summer of 1973, may have been the first 16-bit implementation.

A completely new compiler was completed by Welsh et al. at QUB in 1977. It offered a source-language diagnostic feature (incorporating profiling, tracing and type-aware formatted postmortem dumps) that was implemented by Findlay and Watt at Glasgow University. This implementation was ported in 1980 to the ICL 2900 series by a team based at Southampton University and Glasgow University. The Standard Pascal Model Implementation was also based on this compiler, having been adapted, by Welsh and Hay at Manchester University in 1984, to check rigorously for conformity to the BSI 6192/ISO 7185 Standard and to generate code for a portable abstract machine.

The first Pascal compiler written in North America was constructed at the University of Illinois under Donald B. Gillies for the PDP-11 and generated native machine code.

The Pascal-P system

To propagate the language rapidly, a compiler "porting kit" was created in Zurich that included a compiler that generated code for a "virtual" stack machine, i.e., code that lends itself to reasonably efficient interpretation, along with an interpreter for that code – the Pascal-P system. The P-system compilers were termed Pascal-P1, Pascal-P2, Pascal-P3, and Pascal-P4. Pascal-P1 was the first version, and Pascal-P4 was the last to come from Zurich. The version termed Pascal-P1 was coined after the fact for the many different sources for Pascal-P that existed. The compiler was redesigned to enhance portability, and issued as Pascal-P2. This code was later enhanced to become Pascal-P3, with an intermediate code backward compatible with Pascal-P2, and Pascal-P4, which was not backward compatible.

The Pascal-P4 compiler/interpreter can still be run and compiled on systems compatible with original Pascal. However, it only accepts a subset of the Pascal language.

Pascal-P5, created outside the Zurich group, accepts the full Pascal language and includes ISO 7185 compatibility.

UCSD Pascal branched off Pascal-P2, where Kenneth Bowles utilized it to create the interpretive UCSD p-System. In the early 1980s, UCSD Pascal was ported to the Apple II and Apple III computers to provide a structured alternative to the BASIC interpreters that came integrated with the Apple II, and which was shipped as the initial default programming environment for the Apple III. The UCSD p-System was one of three operating systems available at the launch of the original IBM PC.[7] UCSD Pascal used an intermediate code based on byte values, and thus was one of the earliest "byte code compilers". Pascal-P1 through Pascal-P4 was not, but rather based on the CDC 6600 60 bit word length.

A compiler based on the Pascal-P4 compiler, which created native binaries, was released for the IBM System/370 mainframe computer by the Australian Atomic Energy Commission; it was called the "AAEC Pascal Compiler" after the abbreviation of the name of the Commission.[8]

In the early 1980s, Watcom Pascal was developed, also for the IBM System 370.

An example of educational use. Into the 1990s, Pascal was still running on VAX terminals at GMU. Pascal books were sold and taught to fulfill the programming requirement.

Object Pascal and Turbo Pascal

Apple Computer created its own Lisa Pascal for the Lisa Workshop in 1982, and ported the compiler to the Apple Macintosh and MPW in 1985. In 1985 Larry Tesler, in consultation with Niklaus Wirth, defined Object Pascal and these extensions were incorporated in both the Lisa Pascal and Mac Pascal compilers.

In the 1980s, Anders Hejlsberg wrote the Blue Label Pascal compiler for the Nascom-2. A reimplementation of this compiler for the IBM PC was marketed under the names Compas Pascal and PolyPascal before it was acquired by Borland. Renamed Turbo Pascal. It became hugely popular, thanks in part to an aggressive pricing strategy and in part to having one of the first full-screen Integrated development environments, and fast turnaround-time (just seconds to compile, link, and run.) Additionally, it was written and highly optimized entirely in assembly language, making it smaller and faster than much of the competition. In 1986, Anders ported Turbo Pascal to the Macintosh and incorporated Apple's Object Pascal extensions into Turbo Pascal. These extensions were then added back into the PC version of Turbo Pascal for version 5.5. At the same time Microsoft also implemented the Object Pascal compiler.[9][10] Turbo Pascal 5.5 had a large influence on the Pascal community, which began concentrating mainly on the IBM PC in the late 1980s. Many PC hobbyists in search of a structured replacement for BASIC used this product. It also began to be adopted by professional developers. Around the same time a number of concepts were imported from C to let Pascal programmers use the C-based API of Microsoft Windows directly. These extensions included null-terminated strings, pointer arithmetic, function pointers, an address-of operator and unsafe typecasts.

However, Borland later decided it wanted more elaborate object-oriented features, and started over in Delphi using the Object Pascal draft standard proposed by Apple as a basis. (This Apple draft is still not a formal standard.) The Delphi product was a complete IDE and a comprehensive range of pre-coded customisable objects (most of them Windows screen widgets) known as the 'Visual Component Library' (VCL). The underlying language was Object Pascal. The main additions compared to the older OOP extensions were a reference-based object model, virtual constructors and destructors, and properties. Several other compilers also implement this dialect.

Turbo Pascal, and other derivatives with units or module concepts are modular languages. However, it does not provide a nested module concept or qualified import and export of specific symbols.

Other variants

Super Pascal was a variant that added non-numeric labels, a return statement and expressions as names of types.

The universities of Wisconsin-Madison, Zurich, Karlsruhe and Wuppertal developed the Pascal-SC[11] and Pascal-XSC[12][13][14] (EXtension for Scientific Computing) compilers, aimed at programming numerical computations. TMT Pascal the first Borland-compatible compiler for 32-bit MS-DOS protected mode, OS/2 and Win32 Operating Systems. Also the TMT Pascal language was the first one which allowed function and operator overloading. Pascal-SC originally targeted the Z80 processor, but was later rewritten for DOS (x86) and 68000. Pascal-XSC has at various times been ported to Unix (Linux, SunOS, HP-UX, AIX) and Microsoft/IBM (MS-DOS with EMX, OS/2, Windows) operating systems. It operates by generating intermediate C source code which is then compiled to a native executable. Some of the Pascal-SC language extensions have been adopted by GNU Pascal.

Pascal Sol was designed around 1983 by a French team to implement a Unix-like systems named Sol. It was standard Pascal level-1 (with parametrized array bounds) but the definition allowed alternative keywords and predefined identifiers in French and the language included a few extensions to ease system programming (e.g. an equivalent to lseek).[15] The Sol team later on moved to the ChorusOS project to design a distributed operating system.[16]

IP Pascal was an implementation of the Pascal programming language using Micropolis DOS, but was moved rapidly to CP/M running on the Z80. It was moved to the 80386 machine types in 1994, and exists today as Windows/XP and Linux implementations. In 2008, the system was brought up to a new level and the resulting language termed "Pascaline" (after Pascal's calculator). It includes objects, namespace controls, dynamic arrays, along with many other extensions, and generally features the same functionality and type protection as C#. It is the only such implementation that is also compatible with the original Pascal implementation, which is standardized as ISO 7185.

Smart Mobile Studio was created by Jon Aasenden and compiles his own dialect of Object Pascal to HTML5/Javascript

Smart Mobile Studio has an IDE which includes a visual component set, its language is unusual in that it incorporates extensions for the Javascript language

Language constructs

Pascal, in its original form, is a purely procedural language and includes the traditional array of ALGOL-like control structures with reserved words such as if, then, else, while, for, and so on. However, Pascal also has many data structuring facilities and other abstractions which were not included in the original ALGOL 60, like type definitions, records, pointers, enumerations, and sets. Such constructs were in part inherited or inspired from Simula 67, ALGOL 68, Niklaus Wirth's own ALGOL W and suggestions by C. A. R. Hoare.

Pascal programs start with the program keyword with a list of external file descriptors as parameters[17] (not required in Turbo Pascal etc.); then follows the main block bracketed by the begin and end keywords. Semicolons separate statements, and the full stop (i.e., a period) ends the whole program (or unit). Letter case is ignored in Pascal source.

Here is an example of the source code in use for a very simple "Hello world" program:

program HelloWorld(output);
begin
  Write('Hello, world!')
  {no ";" is required after the last statement of a block -
   adding one adds a "null statement" to the program;}
end.

Data types

A type in Pascal, and in several other popular programming languages, defines a variable in such a way that it defines a range of values which the variable is capable of storing, and it also defines a set of operations that are permissible to be performed on variables of that type. The predefined types are:

Data type Type of values which the variable is capable of storing
integer integer (whole) numbers
real floating-point numbers
boolean the value True or False
char a single character from an ordered character set
string a group or "string" of characters

The range of values allowed for each (except boolean) is implementation defined. Functions are provided for some data conversions. For conversion of real to integer, the following functions are available: round (which rounds to integer using banker's rounding) and trunc (rounds towards zero).

The programmer has the freedom to define other commonly used data types (e.g. byte, string, etc.) in terms of the predefined types using Pascal's type declaration facility, for example

type
  byte        = 0..255;
  signed_byte = -128..127;
  string      = packed array[1..255] of char;

(Often-used types like byte and string are already defined in many implementations.)

Subrange types

Subranges of any ordinal data type (any simple type except real) can also be made:

var
  x : 1..10;
  y : 'a'..'z';

Set types

In contrast with other programming languages from its time, Pascal supports a set type:

var
  Set1 : set of 1..10;
  Set2 : set of 'a'..'z';

A set is a fundamental concept for modern mathematics, and they may be used in many algorithms. Such a feature is useful and may be faster than an equivalent construct in a language that does not support sets. For example, for many Pascal compilers:

if i in [5..10] then ...

executes faster than:

if (i > 4) and (i < 11) then ...

Sets of non-contiguous values can be particularly useful, in terms of both performance and readability:

if i in [0..3, 7, 9, 12..15] then ...

For these examples, which involve sets over small domains, the improved performance is usually achieved by the compiler representing set variables as bit vectors. The set operators can then be implemented efficiently as bitwise machine code operations.

Type declarations

Types can be defined from other types using type declarations:

type
  x = integer;
  y = x;
...

Further, complex types can be constructed from simple types:

type
  a = array[1..10] of integer;
  b = record
        x : integer;
        y : char
      end;
  c = file of a;

File type

As shown in the example above, Pascal files are sequences of components. Every file has a buffer variable which is denoted by f^. The procedures get (for reading) and put (for writing) move the buffer variable to the next element. Read is introduced such that read(f, x) is the same as x := f^; get(f);. Write is introduced such that write(f, x) is the same as f^ := x; put(f); The type text is predefined as file of char. While the buffer variable could be used for inspecting the next character to be used (check for a digit before reading an integer), this leads to serious problems with interactive programs in early implementations, but was solved later with the "lazy I/O" concept.

In Jensen & Wirth Pascal, strings are represented as packed arrays of chars; they therefore have fixed length and are usually space-padded.

Pointer types

Pascal supports the use of pointers:

type
  pNode = ^Node;
  Node  = record
          a : integer;
          b : char;
          c : pNode  {extra semicolon not strictly required}
          end;
var
  NodePtr : pNode;
  IntPtr  : ^integer;

Here the variable NodePtr is a pointer to the data type Node, a record. Pointers can be used before they are declared. This is a forward declaration, an exception to the rule that things must be declared before they are used.

To create a new record and assign the value 10 and character A to the fields a and b in the record, and to initialise the pointer c to NIL, the commands would be:

New(NodePtr);
...
NodePtr^.a := 10;
NodePtr^.b := 'A';
NodePtr^.c := NIL;
...

This could also be done using the with statement, as follows:

New(NodePtr);
...
with NodePtr^ do
begin
  a := 10;
  b := 'A';
  c := NIL
end;
...

Inside of the scope of the with statement, a and b refer to the subfields of the record pointer NodePtr and not to the record Node or the pointer type pNode.

Linked lists, stacks and queues can be created by including a pointer type field (c) in the record (see also NIL).

Unlike many languages that feature pointers, Pascal only allows pointers to reference dynamically created variables that are anonymous, and does not allow them to reference standard static or local variables. Pointers also must have an associated type, and a pointer to one type is not compatible with a pointer to another type (e.g. a pointer to a char is not compatible with a pointer to an integer). This helps eliminate the type security issues inherent with other pointer implementations, particularly those used for PL/I or C. It also removes some risks caused by dangling pointers, but the ability to dynamically deallocate referenced space by using the dispose function (which has the same effect as the free library function found in C) means that the risk of dangling pointers has not been entirely eliminated[18] as it has in languages such as Java and C#, which provide automatic garbage collection (but which do not entirely eliminate the related problem of memory leaks).

Some of these restrictions can be lifted in newer dialects.

Control structures

Pascal is a structured programming language, meaning that the flow of control is structured into standard statements, usually without 'goto' commands.

while a <> b do  WriteLn('Waiting');

if a > b then WriteLn('Condition met')   {no semicolon allowed!}
           else WriteLn('Condition not met');

for i := 1 to 10 do  {no semicolon for single statements allowed!}
  WriteLn('Iteration: ', i);

repeat
  a := a + 1
until a = 10;

case i of
  0 : Write('zero');
  1 : Write('one');
  2 : Write('two');
  3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10: Write('?')
end;

Procedures and functions

Pascal structures programs into procedures and functions.

program Mine(output);

var i : integer;

procedure Print(var j : integer);
begin
...
end;

begin
...
Print(i);
end.

Procedures and functions can nest to any depth, and the 'program' construct is the logical outermost block.

Each procedure or function can have its own declarations of goto labels, constants, types, variables, and other procedures and functions, which must all be in that order. This ordering requirement was originally intended to allow efficient single-pass compilation. However, in some dialects (such as Embarcadero Delphi) the strict ordering requirement of declaration sections has been relaxed.

Semicolons as statement separators

Pascal adopted many language syntax features from the ALGOL language, including the use of a semicolon as a statement separator. This is in contrast to other languages, such as PL/I, C etc. which use the semicolon as a statement terminator. As illustrated in the above examples, no semicolon is needed before the end keyword of a record type declaration, a block, or a case statement; before the until keyword of a repeat statement; and before the else keyword of an if statement.

The presence of an extra semicolon was not permitted in early versions of Pascal. However, the addition of ALGOL-like empty statements in the 1973 Revised Report and later changes to the language in ISO 7185:1983 now allow for optional semicolons in most of these cases. A semicolon is still not permitted immediately before the else keyword in an if statement, because the else follows a single statement, not a statement sequence. In the case of nested ifs, a semicolon cannot be used to avoid the dangling else problem (where the inner if does not have an else, but the outer if does) by putatively terminating the nested if with a semicolon – this instead terminates both if clauses. Instead, an explicit begin...end block must be used.[19]

Programmers usually include these extra semicolons out of habit, and to avoid changing the last line of a statement sequence when new code is appended.

Resources

Compilers and interpreters

Several Pascal compilers and interpreters are available for general use:

A very extensive list can be found on Pascaland. The site is in French, but it is basically a list with URLs to compilers; there is little barrier for non-Francophones. The site, Pascal Central, a Mac centric Pascal info and advocacy site with a rich collection of article archives, plus links to many compilers and tutorials, may also be of interest.

IDEs

Libraries

WOL Library for creating GUI applications with the Free Pascal Compiler.

Standards

ISO/IEC 7185:1990 Pascal

In 1983, the language was standardized, in the international standard IEC/ISO 7185,[22] and several local country specific standards, including the American ANSI/IEEE770X3.97-1983, and ISO 7185:1983. These two standards differed only in that the ISO standard included a "level 1" extension for conformant arrays (an array where the boundaries of the array are not known until run time), where ANSI did not allow for this extension to the original (Wirth version) language. In 1989, ISO 7185 was revised (ISO 7185:1990) to correct various errors and ambiguities found in the original document.

The ISO 7185 was stated to be a clarification of Wirth's 1974 language as detailed by the User Manual and Report [Jensen and Wirth], but was also notable for adding "Conformant Array Parameters" as a level 1 to the standard, level 0 being Pascal without conformant arrays. This addition was made at the request of C. A. R. Hoare, and with the approval of Niklaus Wirth. The precipitating cause was that Hoare wanted to create a Pascal version of the (NAG) Numerical Algorithms Library, which had originally been written in FORTRAN, and found that it was not possible to do so without an extension that would allow array parameters of varying size. Similar considerations motivated the inclusion in ISO 7185 of the facility to specify the parameter types of procedural and functional parameters.

Note that Niklaus Wirth himself referred to the 1974 language as "the Standard", for example, to differentiate it from the machine specific features of the CDC 6000 compiler. This language was documented in The Pascal Report,[23] the second part of the "Pascal users manual and report".

On the large machines (mainframes and minicomputers) Pascal originated on, the standards were generally followed. On the IBM PC, they were not. On IBM PCs, the Borland standards Turbo Pascal and Delphi have the greatest number of users. Thus, it is typically important to understand whether a particular implementation corresponds to the original Pascal language, or a Borland dialect of it.

The IBM PC versions of the language began to differ with the advent of UCSD Pascal, an interpreted implementation that featured several extensions to the language, along with several omissions and changes. Many UCSD language features survive today, including in Borland's dialect.

ISO/IEC 10206:1990 Extended Pascal

In 1990, an extended Pascal standard was created as ISO/IEC 10206,[24] which is identical in technical content[25] to IEEE/ANSI 770X3.160-1989[26]

Variations

Niklaus Wirth's Zurich version of Pascal was issued outside ETH in two basic forms, the CDC 6000 compiler source, and a porting kit called Pascal-P system. The Pascal-P compiler left out several features of the full language. For example, procedures and functions used as parameters, undiscriminated variant records, packing, dispose, interprocedural gotos and other features of the full compiler were omitted.

UCSD Pascal, under Professor Kenneth Bowles, was based on the Pascal-P2 kit, and consequently shared several of the Pascal-P language restrictions. UCSD Pascal was later adopted as Apple Pascal, and continued through several versions there. Although UCSD Pascal actually expanded the subset Pascal in the Pascal-P kit by adding back standard Pascal constructs, it was still not a complete standard installation of Pascal.

In the early 1990s, Alan Burns and Geoff Davies developed Pascal-FC, an extension to Pl/0 (from the Niklaus' book 'Algorithms+Data Structures=Programs'). Several constructs were added to use Pascal-FC as a teaching tool for Concurrent Programming (such as semaphores, monitors, channels, remote-invocation and resources). To be able to demonstrate concurrency, the compiler output (a kind of P-code) could then be executed on a virtual machine. This virtual machine not only simulated a normal – fair – environment, but could also simulate extreme conditions (unfair mode).

Borland-like Pascal compilers

Borland's Turbo Pascal, written by Anders Hejlsberg, was written in assembly language independent of UCSD or the Zurich compilers. However, it adopted much of the same subset and extensions as the UCSD compiler. This is probably because the UCSD system was the most common Pascal system suitable for developing applications on the resource-limited microprocessor systems available at that time.

The shrink-wrapped Turbo Pascal version 3 and later incarnations, including Borland's Object Pascal and Delphi and non-Borland near-compatibles became popular with programmers including shareware authors, and so the SWAG library of Pascal code features a large amount of code written with such versions as Delphi in mind.

Software products (compilers, and Interactive/Rapid Development Environments with compilers, in this category:

List of related standards

Reception

Pascal generated a wide variety of responses in the computing community, both critical and complimentary.

Outdated criticism

While very popular in the 1980s and early 1990s, implementations of Pascal that closely followed Wirth's initial definition of the language were widely criticized for being unsuitable for use outside teaching. Brian Kernighan, who popularized the C language, outlined his most notable criticisms of Pascal as early as 1981, in his paper Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language.[29] The most serious problem described in his article was that array sizes and string lengths were part of the type, so it was not possible to write a function that would accept variable length arrays or even strings as parameters. This made it unfeasible to write, for example, a sorting library. The author also criticized the unpredictable order of evaluation of boolean expressions, poor library support, and lack of static variables, and raised a number of smaller issues. Also, he stated that the language did not provide any simple constructs to "escape" (knowingly and forcibly ignore) restrictions and limitations. (However, there is a feature of "record variants" that does allow such an "escape," though it is decidedly cumbersome.) More general complaints from other sources[18][30] noted that the scope of declarations was not clearly defined in the original language definition, which sometimes had serious consequences when using forward declarations to define pointer types, or when record declarations led to mutual recursion, or when an identifier may or may not have been used in an enumeration list. Another difficulty was that, like ALGOL 60, the language did not allow procedures or functions passed as parameters to predefine the expected type of their parameters.

Despite criticisms, Pascal continued to evolve, and most of Kernighan's points do not apply to versions of the language which were enhanced to be suitable for commercial product development, such as Borland's Turbo Pascal. As Kernighan predicted in his article, most of the extensions to fix these issues were incompatible from compiler to compiler. Since the early 1990s, however, the varieties seem to have condensed into two categories, ISO and Borland-like, a better eventual outcome than Kernighan foresaw.

Although Kernighan decried Pascal's lack of type escapes ("there is no escape" from "Why Pascal is not my Favorite Programming language"), pointers and type escapes lead to the sorts of problems that were addressed by the development of languages such as Java and C#.

Most of Kernighan's criticisms were directly addressed in the paper "The Pascal Programming Language",[31] specifically, under Myth 6: Pascal is Not For Serious Programmers.[32]

The criticisms in Kernighan's paper have become mostly irrelevant with the implementation of Extended Pascal.[33] These outdated criticisms are inaccurately used by many in the field today against current implementations of Pascal.

The following summary addresses outdated criticisms presented by Kernighan, as well as the Pascal extensions which invalidate them.

The size of all arrays are part of its type; therefore, it is not possible to write general-purpose routines to deal with strings of different sizes.
With the introduction of Extended Pascal, variable length strings were implemented, along with several other powerful string capabilities (see item 3. String Capabilities).[34]
The lack of static variables and variable initialization destroy the locality of a program.
Variable initialization is included in the Extended Pascal standard (see item 10. Initial Variable State).[34]
The lack of separate compilation impedes the development of large programs and makes the use of libraries impossible.
Modularity and separate compilation is part of the Extended Pascal standard (see item 1. Modularity and Separate Compilation).[34]
The order of logical expression evaluation cannot be controlled, which leads to convoluted code and extraneous variables.
Short-circuit boolean operators are part of the Extended Pascal standards (see item 24. Short Circuit Boolean Evaluation).[34]
There is no flow control due to the lack of RETURN and BREAK statements.
Although not in the standards, most current Pascals support function and control loop exits. In both Compaq and CodeWarrior Pascals, RETURN will exit a function. In Compaq Pascal, CONTINUE and BREAK are supported in control loops, and in CodeWarrior, CYCLE and LEAVE are supported. More recently, Free Pascal supports BREAK,[35] CONTINUE[36] and EXIT.[37]
The CASE statement is emasculated because there is no default clause.
The Extended Pascal standard now includes an OTHERWISE clause in CASE statements (see item 14. Case-Statement and Variant Record Enhancements).[34]
The language lacks most of the tools needed for assembling large programs, most notably file inclusion.
Extended Pascal's modules provide much more sophisticated support for managing and assembling programs than primitive file inclusion methods (see item 1. Modularity and Separate Compilation).[34] Despite that, most modern versions of Pascal also support file inclusion.
There is no escape from Pascal's strong typing controls.
Although not stated in the standards, type casting is supported in modern Pascal implementations. In Compaq Pascal, "::" is the casting operator (e.g., myVar::myType). In CodeWarrior Pascal, casting is implemented using parenthesis (e.g,. myType(myVar)). The language has evolved without sacrificing strong typing (see Chapter II. The Pascal Architecture).[38]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "We looked very carefully at Delphi Object Pascal and built a working prototype of bound method references in order to understand their interaction with the Java programming language and its APIs ... Our conclusion was that bound method references are unnecessary and detrimental to the language. This decision was made in consultation with Borland International, who had previous experience with bound method references in Delphi Object Pascal." (from About Microsoft's "Delegates" at java.sun.com.
  2. ↑ TechMetrix Research (1999). "History of Java" (PDF). Java Application Servers Report. The project went ahead under the name "green" and the language was based on an old model of UCSD Pascal, which makes it possible to generate interpretive code
  3. ↑ "A Conversation with James Gosling - ACM Queue". Retrieved 11 August 2015.
  4. ↑ Essential Pascal by Marco Cantù
  5. ↑ tiobe.com, Programming Community Index for January 2011.
  6. ↑ Hertzfeld, Andy. "Hungarian folklore.org: Macintosh Stories. Retrieved 2012-03-06.
  7. ↑ "An Interview with JOHN BRACKETT AND DOUG ROSS", p15, Charles Babbage Institute, 2004
  8. ↑ "AUSTRALIAN ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION RESEARCH ESTABLISHMENT, LUCAS HEIGHTS, NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY BRANCH REPORT 1977, DIVISIONAL RESEARCH", p.22, International Atomic Energy Agency (IEAE)
  9. ↑ Jon Udell, Crash of the Object-Oriented Pascals, BYTE, July, 1989.
  10. ↑ M.I.Trofimov, The End of Pascal?, BYTE, March, 1990, p.36.
  11. ↑ doi:10.1016/0898-1221(87)90181-7
  12. ↑ PASCAL-XSC: PASCAL for Extended Scientific Computing
  13. ↑ "XSC Software". Retrieved 11 August 2015.
  14. ↑ "Universitaet Wuppertal: Wissenschaftliches Rechnen / Softwaretechnologie". Retrieved 11 August 2015.
  15. ↑ Michel Gien, "The SOL Operating System", in Usenix Summer '83 Conference, Toronto, ON, (July 1983), pp. 75-78
  16. ↑ cs.berkeley.edu
  17. ↑ Pascal ISO 7185:1990 6.10
  18. 1 2 J. Welsh, W. J. Sneeringer, and C. A. R. Hoare, "Ambiguities and Insecurities in Pascal", Software Practice and Experience 7, pp. 685–696 (1977)
  19. ↑ Pascal, Nell Dale and Chip Weems, "Dangling Else", p. 160–161
  20. ↑ "Flock-JSCodeGenDemo.7z - dwscript - "Flock" DWScript / JavaScript CodeGen demo - Delphi Web Script general purpose scripting engine - Google Project Hosting". Retrieved 11 August 2015.
  21. ↑ "Pascal-S: A Subset and Its Implementation", N. Wirth in Pascal – The Language and Its Implementation, by D.W. Barron, Wiley 1979.
  22. ↑ ISO/IEC 7185:1990 Pascal (PDF). Retrieved 16 September 2014.
  23. ↑ Wirth, Niklaus (July 1973). The Programming Language Pascal (Revised Report) (PDF). ETH Zürich. Retrieved 16 September 2014.
  24. ↑ Extended Pascal: ISO/IEC 10206:1990. Retrieved 16 September 2014.
  25. ↑ "Language standards: Pascal, Extended Pascal, Fortan". http://www.prosperosoftware.com/std.html. External link in |website= (help);
  26. ↑ 770X3.160-1989 - IEEE/ANSI Standard for the Programming Language Extended Pascal. Retrieved 16 September 2014.
  27. ↑ "Virtual Pascal for OS/2". Retrieved 3 April 2016.
  28. ↑ "netlabs.org - Project: Open Sibyl". Retrieved 3 April 2016.
  29. ↑ Brian W. Kernighan (1981). Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language
  30. ↑ O. Lecarme, P. Desjardins, "More Comments on the Programming Language Pascal," Acta Informatica 4, pp. 231–243 (1975)
  31. ↑ The Pascal Programming Language
  32. ↑ Pascal Myths
  33. ↑ Extended Pascal
  34. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Extended Pascal - Chapter 3
  35. ↑ Free Pascal BREAK
  36. ↑ Free Pascal CONTINUE
  37. ↑ Free Pascal EXIT
  38. ↑ Pascal Architecture

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