Many of the decisions for Pascal seem aimed for a teaching language as opposed to a production language. For instance, in a production language, optimisation of generated code is worth a longer compile cycle, but in a teaching language (where programs are repeatedly resubmitted until they barely run, and then are never touched again) short* compile cycles are everything and quality of generated code is an afterthought.
* and cheap: I remember in the days of 30 engineers sharing a VAX that if one person was compiling at a time everything was snappy, but (especially near the end of quarters!) if ten people tried compiling at once interactive latency suffered greatly. Classroom use must've been even worse.
Many of the decisions for Pascal seem aimed for a teaching language as opposed to a production language.
Because it was. The fact it could be extended in so many ways to be a production language shows it had 'good bones', but many practical issues, like I/O, were left as an 'excercise to for the student'.
There seems to have been a lot of revisionist history around Wirths passing with people using Pascals limitations as an indictment of his PLT creds, virtually all of which ignore he was an academic working in academic environment on topics that interested him at the virtual beginning of programming on very, very limited machines. It's like calling Watt a hack because he didn't also add a supercharger and emissions control to the steam engine.
Here's what Wirth wrote about it in retrospective, and yes it was explicitly designed as a teaching language with a syntax suitable for a recursive descent one pass compiler http://youtu.be/5RyU50qbvzQ
> For instance, in a production language, optimisation of generated code is worth a longer compile cycle, but in a teaching language (...) short* compile cycles are everything and quality of generated code is an afterthought.
I don't think this is a valid take. It sounds like an attempt to rationalize away awful build times from some systems language. C++ has atrocious build times, but in contrast C compiles almost instantly. Other production languages such as C# and Java also have fast build times.
I don't think long build times are correlated with optimization or production-ready code. They are however linked with attempts to get compilers to do a lot of work just to get our code to generate machine code, but some of that work is due to how some aspects of a programming language sucks and require more work just to pull off an optimization.
