[cctalk] Re: What constitutes a dead computer language

Interesting. Perhaps it's because the first language I learned was ALGOL (at TU Eindhoven) but I really liked Pascal. I learned it on the PDP-10 after we managed to convince our compiler construction professor to stop requiring us to use PL/C (the Carnegie-Mellon implementation of PL/I, utterly unreliable if you used macros which we had to do a lot). I went from zero knowledge to a complete code generator for our compiler (about 1300 lines of code) in one week. That sort of learning curve has only happened one other time in my career, with Python.