Guido on python3 for beginners

[Grant Edwards]

On 2016-02-19, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:

> Pascal was easy to learn and powerful, but it made the mistake of not
> standardising on a few critical functions that production languages need,
> like strings. Nevertheless, for the first 10 or 15 years, Apple used a mix
> of Pascal and assembly to write not just the operating system but a whole
> lot of applications for the Macintosh. Anyone who says that Pascal is a toy
> language is just ignorant.

At one point, Pascal was quite popular for emedded systems
(e.g. microprocessor) development also.  One of my first projects out
of school back in the early 80's was working on cell-site radio
firmware (Zilog Z8000 uP).

There were a few small extensions to the standard langage to deal with
the fact it was low-level code running on bare metal, but it was quite
a nice language for writing stuff for small microprocessor-based
systems.  After you debugged everything, you could turn off
array-bounds-checking, and the extra overhead compared to something
like C vanished.

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! HAIR TONICS, please!!
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