[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Bear in mind that Pascal was created by Niklaus Wirth as a teaching language...

Pascal wasn't a great deal better.

I know Pascal was intended to be a teaching language.

However, Pascal WAS a great deal better than Basic, at least the Borland version. It was available for different platforms, and it had the BGI, or Borland Graphics Interface, which made graphics essentially cross-platform. It also had a framework called Turbo Vision, which is basically the MS-DOS-predecessor of the Visual Component Library (VCL) from Delphi. The designer of Turbo Vision and later the VCL tried to get the VCL included in Windows for years, but Microsoft wouldn't hear of it.

Then C# came out, and when I first used it in 2006, my reaction was:

"Man... this is like Delphi/VCL, but with C syntax!"

Sure enough, both the VCL and .NET were designed by the same man: Anders Hejlsberg. The VCL used either C++ (Borland C++ Builder) or Object Pascal (Delphi), and they later got combined within the same IDE.

Therefore...

(Object Pascal/C++ on top of VCL) == (VB/C#/etc on top of .NET)

C was designed to be a systems programming language.

I know, and if you need pure speed, C and C++ (which, on compiling, strips ALL of the syntactic sugar such as objects en such) are still unmatched. C and C++ compilers are so good nowadays that it's virtually impossible to write more efficient assembler code by hand.

The object orientation was the point. And bear in mind, the earliest C++ implementation was on Unix in the form of cfront. Cfront parsed the C++ code and "compiled" it to standard C, which was compiled by ccp to assembler, to be assembled to machine code by as, and linked into an executable binary by [i]ld[/d]. C++ compilers that compiled to native code came rather later.

To some extent, steps like these are still common in (for example) the GNU toolchain: compiling from one language to an intermediary, to object code, with assembler compiled by a different program, and then they're all linked together.

And for good reason. Memory management is probably the single biggest source of bugs in code. The less programmers have to be aware of and handle those details, the better. (The machine can do a better job of keeping track of that stuff than you can, and if the tools exist to let it do so, you should use them.)

Agreed. If there's one thing I don't miss from C and C++, it's memory management... but I DO miss strong typing when working in something like Javascript of PHP.

Strong typing, and enforcing variable declarations should be _mandatory_ in any language, because now, the biggest causes of bugs have moved from mishandling memory management, to typo's in variable and function names.

edit:
Anders Hejlsberg

Aaaaaaand.... there you have it, why TypeScript (the 'strongly typed Javascript') uses Pascal-style type syntax: this guy is the lead designer of that language. It seems that, apart from C/C++ (Ritchie, Kernighan, Thompson/Stroustrup), everything I've ever used with regard to programming was either designed, or heavily influenced by Hejlsberg.

I think he needs to be in the same hall of fame as Ritchie, Kernighan, Thompson and Stroustrup. They defined much of the computing environments and languages in the 1960's, 1970's and early 1980's, while Anders Hejlsberg defined most of the stuff from 1985 onwards. First it was Turbo Pascal which made a cheap and powerful compiler and IDE available to everyone (with the Borland Pascal version yet more powerful for professionals), and then Delphi was HUGE from 1995 up to 2004-5, with Delphi 7 and C++ Builder being the best IDE's ever created... IMHO. After 2004-5, .NET basically took over, but it was designed by the same man.

And now that development is moving towards more and more Javascript, taking it out of the browser with NodeJS and it not being fit for purpose anymore (apps are getting too large for a dynamic, untyped language), he is _again_ the lead designer of the next big thing.