Pascal in production environments (was Re: lisadraw)

[Ethan Dicks]

On 11/7/06, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Chris M wrote:
> > what were these routines writtenw in originally? (C
> > presumably I suppose, though one could only wonder why
> > they werent written in assembly TBW)
>
> MOST of the Lisa software seems to have been written in Pascal.
> Part of Job's "we want the next (sic) generation, NOT a repeat of what we
> already have!" philosophy that caused him to hire some CS graduates with
> NO experience in order to get a fresh approach.  Some of them didn't even
> know that current Pascal compilers were designed for TEACHING programming,
> and did not produce output suitable for real world.

I had the "enjoyable experience" to be the first seasoned programmer
to join a small company that was doing work on the PDP-11 and the
PC-AT.  Most of _my_ work was in PDP-11 and 80286 assembler, but the
main guy was in his first programming job of his career and did
everything in Pascal.  :-P

The company was mapping out a switch to C for a variety of good
reasons, but unfortunately, due to external causes (not the choice of
Pascal), they went out of business before we started the transition.

At that company, I learned several times over why Pascal is not my
favorite language.

-ethan