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2006-10-16 #1

Created by kgr. Last edited by kgr, one year and 281 days ago. Viewed 187 times. #1

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The Legacy of Pascal

In a Lambda the Ultimate

discussion, Paul Snively laments

...the fact that the industry went chasing off on on the C/C++ trail vs. the Pascal/Modula/Modula-2/Oberon trail. Things would be so, so different if it hadn't, IMHO.

I disagree. I don’t think that things would be any different at all. Except for superficial syntax similarities, Java as actually a descendent of Pascal rather than of C. The lineage of Java is:

Pascal -> Mesa -> Cedar -> Oak/Java
             |--> Modula2

You can even see the lineage in Java’s original name: “Oak”, which pays homage to "Cedar". The purpose of the Oak project was to take Cedar and give it a more "C"-ish syntax so that it would acceptable to the masses (of C programmers). (Modula2 was also inspired by Mesa so I guess that would make it Java’s Uncle.)

C# is also derived from Pascal:

Pascal -> Mesa -> Cedar -> Oak/Java -> C#
Pascal -> TurboPascal -> Delphi -------/

Despite whatever Microsoft may say about C#’s origins, it has nothing to do with C++. C# is clearly just a Java clone with some added ideas from Delphi (which is Pascal).

Today, most programmers are programming in languages which are semantically descendent from Pascal and merely syntactically descendent from C. (Better this than the other way around ;-) ).

C, on the other hand, has become an evolutionary dead-end (which is not to say that it’s dead, just that it isn’t spawning any new descendents).

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