Re: Re: New Book: The School of Niklaus Wirth

        First of all, I want to make it clear that I'm just putting in my 0.02e0
:) I'm not trying to start a flame war. I know C, C++, Pascal, assembly
language, and a little BASIC so my opinions are not based on blind devotion.
        For the record, I design algorithms and I program primarily in Pascal.
Despite Pascal's lacks and quirks I love the language, but I can't honestly
say that it is better than C/C++, nor can I agree that C and/or C++ are
poorly designed.


"Mikael Lyngvig" <mikael@pobox.com> wrote in message
> It could just be a simple question of "being able to adopt to customer
> demands".


        I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to disagree here, Pascal was
created as a language to teach structured(?) programming. Problem is
that if you learn Pascal (or BASIC, but it's not as bad with BASIC)
before learning C/C++, your C/C++ learning curve will increase
tremendously. As for being able to adapt to customer demands, it would
be more accurate to say that "Pascal is being extending to function
more like C++".


> The fact that ill-designed languages such as C++, and C to a certain
> degree, have indoctrinated programmers to think case-sensitively
> should not be blamed upon Mr. Wirth.


        I also have to disagree here. C++ has its quirks, but when
comparing C++ to OO Pascal, one of my pet peeves is that Pascal does
not call its constructor or destructor automatically (it's incredibly
annoying that your virtual functions cause a program crash because
they were not initialized). Also, why on Earth would anyone want
multiple constructors or multiple destructors? Generally speaking,
Pascal is strict on type checking which does not allow for
overloading. One more Pascal pet peeve, why is there no unsigned
integer (one of my biggest pet peeves)?


        There are two really annoying features in C, C++, and Pascal; 1)
semi-colons are required, 2) "{" and "}" or "begin" and "end" can make
a program unreadable by nesting in as little as 3 levels. BASIC has
the right idea in requiring that you specify what you're ending.


        I wish there was a programming language like the script language
I'm working on.


See ya!
Orlando

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