Semicolons

Posted Apr 14, 2023 1:54 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Semicolons by corbet
Parent article: The early days of Linux

> The first high-level language I learned was actually Pascal

Since we're quoting Linus today: "Yeah, yeah, most _practical_ versions of Pascal ended up having all the stuff necessary to break structure, but as you may be able to tell, I was one of the unwashed masses who had to write in "standard Pascal" in my youth. I'm scarred for life"

Semicolons

Posted Apr 14, 2023 4:27 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (1 responses)

My first language was BASIC, on a TRS-80 and a BBC Micro. Then came Pascal (Turbo Pascal on MS-DOS). I learned C in grad school in a physics department. I successfully avoided learning Fortran ever. But I'm told Fortran 2003 onwards is not so bad.

Semicolons

Posted Apr 17, 2023 1:02 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Fortran certainly is interesting these days. Many modifiers are available to fine tune exactly what you mean (instead of C's "eh, something sane or UB" coin flip). Of course, discovering the modifiers is troublesome at times and with umpteen ways to spell things, the "best" way feels more like C++ subsetting arguments if one cared enough to argue about it.

Semicolons

Posted May 15, 2023 5:44 UTC (Mon) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693) [Link]

When I was at uni in the late '90s, we had a course "Programming for Physicists" that used Standard Pascal. I was already familiar with a handful of other languages (including TurboPascal™) and finding out that there was such a thing as a "high level" language with no concept of "strings" was mind blowing (and not in a good way)!

Thankfully, I understand that my cohort was the last year before they switched to using that new fangled "Java" thing, which despite valid criticisms was at least a great language for learning how to "do OOP right".

Standard Pascal is not, IMNSHO a "great language" for really anything other than being less brain damaging than my later experience having to use that prehistoric dinosaur FORTRAN - and because it was in the context of stick-in-the-mud physicists at a university, it was a pretty early flavour, too (which at least *had strings* as of FORTRAN77 in '78, 2 decades before that Pascal course!)

I'm mostly Ok now, though. *twitch*