Re: What makes a language popular?

In article <632@ima.ISC.COM> this comment appeared:
>Pascal: The universally recognized standard reference is Jensen and Wirth.


Since 1981, there has been an ANSI standard for Pascal which cleans
up the definition that one can glean from J&W. In particular, it
repairs the perfunctory job that was done on passing procedure &
function names to other procedures & functions, and resolves several
ambiguities in J&W.


There is also an ISO standard, which is similart to the ANSI standard
but goes beyond it in one direction: "conformant arrays," which allow
the programmer to write a subprogram what will take arrays of a given
element type and varying size. This is a valuable feature, already
present in FORTRAN and other languages.


At least one company (Concurrent Computer Corporation) supports a
Pascal compiler that conforms to the ISO standard.


ANSI = American National Standards Institute. (USA only.)
ISO = International Standards Organization. (World-wide, but still
confined to Planet Earth.)
"universally recognized" presumably refers to the much larger part of
existence that is beyond our atmosphere.


Regards,
Chris
--
Full-Name: Christopher J. Henrich
UUCP: ...!hjuxa!petsd!cjh
US Mail: MS 313; Concurrent Computer Corporation;
                        106 Apple St; Tinton Falls, NJ 07724
Phone: (201) 758-7288
Concurrent Computer Corporation is a Perkin-Elmer company.
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