It's Kernighan's view of Pascal after writing "Software Tools in Pascal". It's not (as widely perceived) a hit piece on Pascal. It's Kernighan saying "I wrote the original 'Software Tools' in Ratfor. Rewriting it in Pascal should have been much easier than it was. Why?"
I know the piece well. Back when, my university used "Oh, Pascal!" to teach introductory programming to programmers. For worse reasons than Kernighan, I never liked that the length of an array was part of the type in Pascal, but, in retrospect, that might've saved a couple Trillion in buffer overflow problems.
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You might find this interesting, then: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pasc...
It's Kernighan's view of Pascal after writing "Software Tools in Pascal". It's not (as widely perceived) a hit piece on Pascal. It's Kernighan saying "I wrote the original 'Software Tools' in Ratfor. Rewriting it in Pascal should have been much easier than it was. Why?"
I know the piece well. Back when, my university used "Oh, Pascal!" to teach introductory programming to programmers. For worse reasons than Kernighan, I never liked that the length of an array was part of the type in Pascal, but, in retrospect, that might've saved a couple Trillion in buffer overflow problems.
At the price of being fundamentally unable to deal with variable-length arrays? That seems like taking away a rather fundamental ability.