alt Hacker NewsIt's funny seeing the problems with C Niklaus Wirth pointed out originally still trying to be solved. He solved them with pascal and its OO successors, though for some reason it's not cool still.
I suppose it has less of the ability to blow your foot off and so isn't a very dangerous way to code, therefore not cool. If any of you younger folk haven't looked at it, I'd suggest having a look, there is Delphi - a cross platform dev environment that addresses all these problems and compiles in less than a second, or there's the free, open source alternative Lazarus. They also compile to mobile platforms and even the raspberry pi (Lazarus) or Arduino.
If you like contracts then ADA is the way to go, but I haven't used this for many years, so not sure what is the state of the compilers.
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I would argue that Go is the closest spiritual descendant of Wirth's languages. If you changed braces into BEGIN/END and so on, it would look a ton like Oberon or Modula 2/3.
It adds features (goroutines, channels, slices), changes some (modules become packages), the generics are a little different, and it eschews some of Wirth's pragmatic type safety ideas (like range types). It even has ":=" for assignment.
The general spirt is the same, I think: Small language, simple compiler (compared to many other languages), "dumb" type system, GC, engineering-focused rather than-type theory-focused.
Both Pascal and C (and their offspring) are wonderful gifts for us to receive from their designers, and I enjoy writing code in both.
> It's funny seeing the problems with C Niklaus Wirth pointed out originally still trying to be solved. He solved them with pascal and its OO successors, though for some reason it's not cool still.
Here's Brian Kernighan's view on the shortcomings of Pascal resulting from a practical book project idea:
https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html
Not sure to what extent the latest Oberon or Ada have addressed all of these, since I've not kept up with Ada news.