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Comment by 👽 TKurtBond

Re: "Why did Wirth's languages never see widespread adoption..."

In: s/pascal

I've enjoyed using the vishap oberon compile on occasion. Thanks for making it available! I found out about the package manager by reading this thread, and I'm quite interested!

👽 TKurtBond

Apr 26 · 2 weeks ago

7 Later Comments ↓

👽 TKurtBond · Apr 26 at 22:10:

I really found Writh's Oberon very inspirational, both the programming language and the operating system. The book "Project Oberon: Design of an Operating System and Compiler" is very impressive. I also particularly liked Oberon-2. The fact that Wirth made his later developoments in Oberon the language and the operating system and the book available on the Internet is also very inspiring. I wish they were a little more accessable, though.

👽 TKurtBond · Apr 26 at 22:11:

I also like Modula-3, and wish it was more accessible as well.

🚀 eddos [OP] · Apr 28 at 07:17:

The good and bad, for me, about Pascal is that there aren't 1 million websites that have solved every problem for me. With python I just do a search f or my problem and get an answer

I think that's a quality of python itself, due to how popular it is. I've found that most other languages don't have this either, so it might not be a thing with pascal.

i never liked this '\n' and printf because we pay for it with preprocessor

s (c requires cpp preprocessor), defines, macros, and complex compilers.

I never thought of it this way. But I don't know if a simple \n needs a pre-processor, though.

🚀 eddos [OP] · Apr 28 at 07:19:

for m3 i know - cm3.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

for oberon, i am biased. i have my project i work on since long ago.

Honestly, this is really impressive. VOC looks very mature. The package manager is very cool too.

it means it produces very readable, but c code. libc is a dependency, c compiler too. but the generated c code is safe, and there is a good runtime.

Really? How do you ensure the safety of the C code? And how is the mapping from oberon to C?

so in order to write that irc bot, first i made a wrapper for unix sockets, then implemented some part of irc protocol, then only the bot logic.

🚀 eddos [OP] · Apr 28 at 07:20:

That doesn't sound so bad. I know you usually wouldn't need to do the first two steps but after you're done, you could use the protocol implementation for other projects. They're always there.

🐙 norayr [mod] · Apr 29 at 02:32:

on safety of c code: it is a generated c code. likewise writing in assembly is not safe but assembly generated from oberon or ada is safe. (:

another addition is this example: oberon arrays always have size. even if you expect in the function

VAR str: ARRAY OF CHAR

when you get str, you know the size. we pass the size as an additional argument, it is visible in c code, but hidden in oberon.

oberon compiler which produces machine code would send an oberon string which is actually a struct with one field for size. well voc also keeps arrays as structs with one field for length.

🐙 norayr [mod] · Apr 29 at 02:40:

TKurtBond, on package manager, my dream is to be able to

Original Post

🌒 s/pascal

Why did Wirth's languages never see widespread adoption besides Pascal? Even Pascal is not used much nowadays outside of Delphi and Lazarus. I tried Pascal myself and I found it to be a nice language structurally, but I also found it to be missing basic features that relate to writing the language itself (example: not being able to insert newlines into strings like you would do in C via '\n'). I also don't like how much "modern" Pascal is centered around just 2 compilers: FreePascal and...

💬 eddos · 43 comments · Apr 25 · 2 weeks ago