why not Pascal

[Manorama]

Sir,
when i have pointers concept in Pascal also, why has become
unpopular when C has come to the market. We can do anything
in Pascal like in C .
Thanks
Manu:confused:

[jfaust]

Yes, Pascal solves all the same problems that C does, and is possibly easier to read. At least, I think that C can be made to be more difficult to read, given the right programmer. hrmmm....

Well, I could be wrong, but I believe that Pascal is owned by Borland and C is more public domain. That being the case, I am simply more comfortable using a C compiler than a Pascal compiler. If you have problems with the vendor in C, you can simply switch (well, maybe not THAT simple), but with Pascal you rely on one company.

Another thing is that C has a younger, object oriented brother named C++ that it works fairly well with. I don't believe Pascal has any such counterpart. Unless you count Delphi, which I don't think qualifies.

Actually the main reason was probably that it was either more accessible by college students at the time or it was more in style for whatever reason.

There's my 2 cents.

Jeff

[Plastelin]

As I hear, in Pascal you cannot see all code sources, because all work with Strings are written on ASM. But in C++ almost all code written on C++ and you can walk under debugger and see what was wrong.
And more: once I see how to create object in Pascal ... it was terreble.

But in other case, peaples seing what on Delfi is very easy to implement UI. :)

[jwycoff]

Even though the first editions of Pascal arrived before the first editions of C, you need to also consider the background of the languages as well. Pascal was concipated as a teaching language, while C was primarily associated with Unix programming in the begin. With the growth in popularity of Unix and its variants, C naturally grew in popularity with a certain crowd. Pascal never really had this strong community to back it up.

For some info on the history of some programming languages, check out:

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/levenez/lang/


Cheers,
Jason

[sivakumar_ga]

C has always been believed to support systems programming better than any other language(Some one can confirm this). I think some finer features like unions have given an edge for C over the other languages!

Siva

[avantos]

Hey,


Was reading through the posts and one thing caught my eye...about C and C++ being public domain..... I tend to agree except that it is almost manditory that you own VC++ if you want to make a living writting windows programs. Otherwise, ****...i love the GNU compiler and I think borland builder is a much better written program.

My two cents...

-Avantos

[JMS]

Pascal is a public domain language with standards just like C/C++.

The reason why C/C++ took off and ultimately became the formost language in the world ( of it's day, which seems to have passed) is because Unix was written in C. As such a very sophisticated core group of folks grew and championed it and easier to read pascal just took on the role of a babies language. Simpler to read and understand and less versitile for elegant solutions.

It might not be fair, but it's probable a correct outcome. I mean C/C++ one can write device drivers and all sorts of low level bit oporators, Pascal is just not extesible like that, pointers aside.

[UgicTox]

C is known for its flexibility. There're more data types in C than in Pascal. Also it's quite easy to perform pointer operations.

When I switched to C from Pascal, not only did I adopted the new syntax, but also a new way of thinking. Personally, I think Pascal is closer to human logic and C is closer to machines. It's necessary to think of the system resource usage and the alogrithm at the same time.

Somebody pointed out that object in Pascal was defined in a nasty way. I disagree. Since the release of Borland Turbo Pascal 6.0, pascal became OOP enabled. Object Pascal supports one of the most important object-oriented features: virtual functions. What else do you need from pascal? It's a educational language after all. There're no "protected" attribute, no "clone" or "friend" methods.

Let's leave C++ alone. Simply talking about features in C, there're reasons for C being more popular. As mentioned in previous posts, C supports Union. Another good thing is macro. You can never find such thing in Pascal.

One more thing. When you create a huge C project, you write header files and implement them to your main program. Code is reusable. For Pascal, however, you have to compile each file as a Unit and then, implement them, like a DLL or a bytecode thing.

Yet still, the code produced by a Pascal compiler is less efficient. I can't tell the reason why. It's what it is.

Switch to C/C++, my friend. I agree Pascal does a lot. but C/C++ is more than a programming language. It's also a language used by venteran programmers worldwide. Join us, to the C community!

S.Dme