Pascal in production environments (was Re: lisadraw)

[Stan Sieler]

Re:
>     I worked at a company which produced a distributed processing
> database system.  The program set was just over a million lines of
> Pascal.  It was a specialized Pascal, however, which started out life as
> HP Pascal.  With a better library, it was a truly useful language.  It

True...HP's Pascal had a few great enhancements that raised Pascal from
being a barely adequate teaching language to being an extremely
valuable programming language.  

> was ALWAYS, as I see it, more suited for applications programs than
> system work, however.

The HP 3000 operating system, MPE/iX, is written in HP Pascal
(predominantly).

> > no flames or long discussions about C, please.

Good point.  I've discovered that the people passionately 
defending any one particular language over all others are usually
not well versed in the others.  Every language has its place,
even if that place is the scrap heap of history :)

For me, my choice of language for new code depends mostly upon
operating system:
   MPE:    2/3 HP Pascal, 1/3 SPLash! (an SPL variant)
   HP-UX:  2/3 C, 1/3 HP Pascal
   Windows/Mac/other Unix: C (none of that new-fangled C++ :)

Stan
-- 
Stan Sieler
sieler at allegro.com
www.allegro.com/sieler/wanted/index.html