Let's say the tyranny of the C children has diverted our attention. I'll make a wild ass statement: If Modula-2 (Wirth family with Pascal) had caught on, you would have had whatever you wanted from Rust 20 years ago. But the C noise dominated the narrative.
Use the language that makes you money and encourages you to write code that addresses domains requiring more than just bolting together framework pieces. AI can do a measurable chunk of that work.
20 years ago was 2004, and Borland Delphi 7 was out. It was Pascal-based, but it didn't had that much difference from C programs.
It had a nice unit system with separate interface & implementation sections. This was very nice. The unit files were not compatible with anything else, including previous versions of Delphi - this was not nice, especially since a lot of libraries were distributed in compiled form.
The compilation speed was amazingly fast. This is one thing that was unequivocally better than C at this time.
There were range types (type TExample = 1..1000), but they more of a gimmick - turns out there are very few use cases for build-time limits. There were some uses back in DOS days when you'd have hardcoded resolution of 640x480, but in the windows time most variables were just Integer.
Arrays had optional range checks on access, that was also nice. We'd turn them off if we felt programs were too slow.
Otherwise, it was basically same as C with a bit of classes - custom memory allocation/deallocation, dangling pointers, NULLs, threads you start and stop, mutexes and critical sections. When I finally switched from Pascal to C, I didn't see that much difference (except compilation got much slower)
Maybe you'd say that Borland did something wrong, and Wirth's Modula-2 would be much better than Borland's Pascal, but I doubt this.
Yep, optional range checks and a variety of other compiler defines to accommodate programmers coming from a C background who preferred to disregard compile time checks in the name of speed of execution. So sure, you can still to this day make pascal act like C. You even get comment delimiters. Kind of adds credence to the influence of C that I'm suggesting.
Wirth languages are about constraints. For instance, when I started writing code in TSM2 and Stonybrook, my general impression was that they both emitted 10-30% more compile time bugs than BP did. If that's too much of a hassle for C programmers, well ok.
Also to add, all the wordiness of Wirth languages, the block delimiters, yes I get it. But all this stuff is just another constraint for sake of correctness. M2, being case sensitive, is even worse about this than Pascal. But the point is to make you look at your code more than once, to proofread it and think about what's going on, because the syntax screams at you a little bit. Of course, with compiler defines, you can turn pascal into C and assume the responsibility for yourself. That's what runtime debuggers are for anyway, yes?
Ok, whatever, but we're missing the point that Wirth was trying to get across, which is to turn the language itself into implicit TDD, starting with first line of code written. C/++ may give you speed, but for the average programmer, all that speed is taken back in the end, due to maintenance costs. IMO, M2 was even better at shifting maintenance costs left of what the C tack did than pascal in the value delivery stream.
Sure, mission critical code can be written even in C/++. Most of SpaceX's code is a C++ codebase. So how did they pull that off? IMO, what they did was write C in the spirit of what Wirth was trying to accomplish. For the sake of maintenance costs, speed is now less of a metric thanks to hardware advances, and correctness is far more of an issue. Which makes sense, because all business is mission critical now and all business runs on more and more software. Would you turn off bounds checks in the compiler now? How about for the programmer who you'll never meet who is writing autonomous driver code for the car you drive?
Way too much money was wasted on the near-sighted value of C. Time to move on, according to Rust developers, who undoubtedly have an impressive background as C/++ programmers. So yeah we all have to follow this C dominated narrative even today, and my charge is, this narrative has retarded the art of programming. So I stick to my original proposition: Whatever you think is great about Rust, like ownership and borrowing, would have been available in production M2 code 20 years ago if we had just given Wirth languages a chance to advance the art in the commercial world. But that narrative would have been too wordy and constraining.
> It is written in the Pascal language, a well-stabilized standard language with compatibility promises for decades. Using the FreePascal compiler and the Lazarus IDE for free and easy development.
The code is written to be seen as pseudocode. In place of need, comments are written to help.
