OT: This Swift thing

[Michael Torrie]

On 06/07/2014 09:23 AM, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> On 07 Jun 2014 04:57:19 GMT, Steven D'Aprano
> <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> declaimed the following:
> 
>>
>> Swift is intended as a new generation *systems language*. The old 
>> generation of systems languages are things like C, Objective-C, C#, C++, 
>> Java, Pascal, Algol, and so forth. The new generation are intended to 
>> fulfil the same niches, but to have syntax and usability closer to that 
>> of scripting languages. Languages like Go, Rust, Ceylon, and now Swift.
>>
> 	Pascal as a systems language? We must have major differences what
> constitutes a systems language then...
> 
> 	Native Pascal had no features to support hitting the hardware or
> arbitrary memory addresses/registers. It was a candidate for an
> applications language (though even that always felt a stretch to me; as a
> teaching language for structured programming it was ideal, though). Try
> writing a serial port driver for a memory mapped I/O system using pure
> Pascal.

Technically C doesn't either, except via subroutines in libc, though C
does have pointers which would be used to access memory.  In the old MS
DOS days, C would embed assembly to call interrupts and set up interrupt
tables, etc.

As someone else mentioned recently, Pascal was used as the system
language on Mac computers for many years.