💾 Archived View for bbs.geminispace.org › u › TKurtBond › 16412 captured on 2024-05-26 at 16:54:03. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-05-12)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Re: "Why did Wirth's languages never see widespread adoption..."
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!
Apr 26 · 4 weeks ago
👽 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
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...