----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull>
Newsgroups: povray.off-topic
Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 8:30 AM
Subject: Programming langauges


> Cast your mind way, way back, to the Dark Ages [...]

Wow... so many thoughts, and the coffee is only beginning to swirl in my 
brain...

Bear in mind that the world wasn't as connected then as it is now. 
Advancement in technology was slower, people used books and published papers 
to share technical ideas, not the Internet. Even now, people use different 
programming languages because, for the most part, programmers are 
provincialists who tend to think the first language they learned is the best 
one.

Pascal was never intended to be efficient on the inside, and was often 
rejected by people working to create real-world software for that reason. 
Wirth invented Pascal specifically as a teaching tool to educate students in 
the concepts of nested, structured programming with a hierarchy of 
visibility of token names. He himself never intended for it to be used in 
the real world. OTOH, Ritchie (and Kernighan, but mostly Ritchie) 
implemented C as a way to take a step back from machine code and assemblers 
to make it easier to port system software across radically different 
hardware architectures.

BASIC was also developed as a teaching tool, but it was also considered the 
best choice by many for popular use (the name itself may have lead that 
charge, based on the power of suggestion). More importantly, BASIC is 
interpreted, so you can ship it without a compiler, linker, or memory for 
large symbol tables. Slap it in a ROM, stick it in your gray box, and start 
selling.

Myself, I was programming a PDP 11 (and a VAX 11/780 shortly thereafter) 
using both C and Pascal at about the same time you were loading your 
cassette tapes. I did have a Vic 20 about then, which I tried to program a 
duplicate of Q*bert on. Good times, that. :D

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