At 06:55 AM 11/9/2006 -0500, James Knott wrote:
Doug McGarrett wrote:
Oh, yeah? Try and buy a copy of Turbo Pascal, or Eureka. Whatever they might be doing now is no help to me.
James Knott wrote:
Try to buy anyone's Pascal. It appears to be a dead language these days.
Check out "Pascal compiler" in Google. It's not quite gone. I found Pascal to be a very logical and useful language. One of the most helpful ideas was the "case" statement. You could do in a few lines what it took as many as several pages of BASIC. I guess something similar exists in C, but I always got the idea that C was too convoluted, compared to Pascal. (Pascal is the only language I actually took a college course in, about the time that CPM was becoming popular, and affordable, altho if I had been a bit younger, I would surely have been exposed to Fortran and punched cards.) While I was actively doing engineering, I saw a lot of programmers writing C and C++ to control microprocessors, but I don't remember anyone ever writing a C program to actually solve a set of equations and provide answers in plain numerical output, as BASIC and Pascal did. Well, I take that back--I suppose that the modern spreadsheets are written in a C dialect. I think Eureka was written in Pascal, but I'm not sure. Eureka was a Borland product that solved equations, but it was _really_ a GIGO routine. It would provide some kind of answer, no matter what garbage you fed it. It really taught you to be careful! But unlike spreadsheets, it understood x, y, z, etc. instead of +b13. I suppose Mathcad is still around, but it had the world's worst editor, and I never got used to it. (By the time I could get anything useful entered, I could have solved by hand!) --doug