>> That must make me rare then. I can program in BASIC [I MEAN OLD SKOOL 
>> BASIC WITH ALL-CAPS AND LINE NUMBERS INSTEAD OF A TEXT EDITOR], Pascal 
>> (which is structured), PostScript (which is weird), JavaScript, Java, 
>> Smalltalk, Eiffel (which are all OOP), Haskell (which is functional), SQL 
>> (which is relational), and I have a vague grasp of Lisp and Prolog. I've 
>> also written in machine code. (No, I don't mean assembly. I *mean* machine 
>> code. I couldn't afford an assembler, so I assembled the program by hand 
>> with a big book of op-code tables...)
>>
>> Did I mention POV-Ray SDL in there?
> 
> Hmmm... lessee... Coursewriter, Fortran, COBOL, Pascal, Lisp, BASIC 
> (Dartmouth, A-BASIC, GWBASIC, VB et cetera on and on), C, C++, C#, Providex, 
> BBx, ZPL, Psion AXL, Forth, Prolog, APL (not much), Erlang, x86 Assembler, 
> System 36 Assembler--

I might also throw in Mathematica, TeX, Tcl, MS-DOS scripting, and the 
various other languages which aren't "programming languages" such as 
HTML, CSS, XSLT, AmigaGuide, ARexx, Automake, the lambda calculus...

> There's more but that's enough urinating off the port bow. :)

;-)

>> I've heard this before. I never really understood why Pascal couldn't be a 
>> useful real-world language. (Aside from a few obvious flaws which should 
>> have been easy to fix.)
> 
> As originally designed, Pascal didn't support source code modules or 
> including files, which made it difficult to write large programs with, and 
> made it almost impossible for a team to work on an application. You couldn't 
> make libraries to link to later, or use any kind of dynamic linking with it.

When I first encountered it, Pascal already had modules and sane I/O. (I 
gather that at one time this was not the case.) It still had that silly 
restriction where array sizes had to be known at compile-time for no 
apparent reason...

Anyway, it's irrelevant now. Pascal is a monomorphic language. It would 
get laughed at today.

> What's great for that is Forth... you can fit the rules engine in about 4Kb 
> and include the most commonly defined symbols. All the rest of your RAM, 
> which doesn't have to be much, is available for code. Like Lisp, though, 
> it's a stack oriented language, and I think that confuses a lot of the 
> masses.

Heh, yeah, I can't see that one taking off really...

(You can also interpret Haskell fairly easily, but it probably requires 
too many resouces.)

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