At 06:37 PM 3/10/00 +1030, Geoff Roberts wrote:
>You forgot to add "and is perfectly comprehensible to anyone with long
>experience in assembly language or machine code." That's it's big
>problem. I can look at something in Turbo Pascal and make sense of it.
>It even made some sense to me before I read the manuals.
I was in college in an unfortunate time in the early 80s when you were
expected to be able to program in C to produce course work, yet there
were no courses that taught C. They "taught" C via volunteers outside
of class time out of sheer necessity. It was useless.
I agree completely - after having my brain warped by years of BASIC
and a smattering of Pascal, thinking of C as a fancy macro assembler
was the fastest way to learn, read and program in C.
You might enjoy reading my copy of "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite
Programming Language" by Brian Kernighan, one of the creators of C, at
http://www.threedee.com/jcm/psystem/whypascal.html .
These religious wars tend to forget about the talents of the programmer.
I've ported programs from language to language, and there are some people
who can't write their way out of a paper bag. Well-written Pascal code
can port quite quickly to C or Java, and vice-versa.
In most languages, you're free to write memory leaks, spaghetti control
structures, incomprehensible data structures, undocumented file formats,
bizarre and obtuse methods of twiddling bits or operating system records,
etc.
- John
Jefferson Computer Museum
http://www.threedee.com/jcm/
Received on Fri Mar 10 2000 - 08:49:36 GMT