Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!watdragon!violet!gjditchfield
From: gjditchfield@violet.waterloo.edu (Glen Ditchfield)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Sucessful Languages (was: Algol-68 down for the count)
Message-ID: <10085@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Date: 30 Nov 88 15:19:51 GMT
References: <388@ubbpc.UUCP> <16187@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <599@quintus.UUCP> <79153@sun.uucp> <409@ubbpc.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@watdragon.waterloo.edu
Reply-To: gjditchfield@violet.waterloo.edu (Glen Ditchfield)
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
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In article <409@ubbpc.UUCP> wgh@ubbpc.UUCP (William G. Hutchison) writes:
>  I consider Pascal to be a teaching and publication language, not a practical
>application language, so I consider it to be a success, *given Wirth's stated
>design goals*, not the goals who wanted Pascal to replace FORTRAN, COBOL, or
>PL/I.

Dr. Wirth certainly did intend that Pascal be a practical application
language.  The abstract of "The Programming Language Pascal" [Acta
Informatica, v1 #1] says
	In view of its intended usage both as a convenient basis
	to teach programming and as an efficient tool to write
	large programs ...
"An Assessment of the Programming Language Pascal" [IEEE Transactions on
Software Engineering, June 1975]  starts with a discussion of "reliable
software" and ends with the conclusion
	Instead of relying too much on either antiquated "debugging
	tools" or on futuristic automatic program verifiers, we
	should give more emphasis to the systematic construction of
	programs with languages that facilitate transparent formulation
	and automatic consistency checks.
	   The language Pascal was designed with exactly these aims.