This meant that kids who learned BASIC on 8-bit micros at home regarded Pascal as a backward language that restricted what they could do, whereas people from a formal teaching environment regarded it as very good language for precisely the same reason! Almost none of the high level languages of the time had that built into the language itself (it was normal for these to be added by library routines, the most obvious example being Curses for C). But at least that was not unique to Pascal. And there was no form-filling or screen handling features at all.
#Bleep bleep codecademy code
This meant that you quite often had to do code some comparatively simple operations yourself.
There was also no variable length string construct (there were fixed length character arrays), and as a result, almost no what you would describe as string operations. Files with multiple record types were complex (you had to use a construct like variant records to do this), and the very strong data typing did not have the equivalent of a cast operation (I'm still talking strict Pascal here), which made some of the tricks that you do in other languages difficult or impossible. The other drawback of strict Pascal implementations (and here I am explicitly excluding all Borland/Zortech and other 'extended' products) was that there was comparatively little support for some operations that were needed in order to cope with real-life problems. But I'm not sure whether that was preferable to the compiler incorrectly attempting to fix simple errors like the PL/1 subset teaching compiler called PL/C, which is what I learned formal programming in. But the repeated compile/fix cycles without a run caused many colourful moments in the classes I was involved in. Now Pascal would never force you to write programs that worked, but it would protect you from some of the pitfalls that other languages might allow. In other languages at the time, you might get a successful compile, but have a completely broken program because of an escaped syntax error. Because of the precise syntax and strict type checking, it was a very pedantic language to write. It is quite clear that someone who learned Pascal could convert to other scientific languages (like Fortran or or Algol) relatively easily, and I know lots of people who moved to C with little difficulty.īut as a language, it was strongly disliked by students.
It's prime goal was to be highly structured, and have a very concise syntax that encouraged students to think in the way that matched the good programming practices of the time (highly structured, functional and procedural programming). Pascal was created as a teaching language.
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