Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language

The programming language Pascal has become the dominant language of instruction in computer science education.  It has also strongly influenced languages developed subsequently, in particular Ada.

Pascal was originally intended primarily as a teaching language, but it has been more and more often recommended as a language for serious programming as well, for example, for system programming tasks and even operating systems.

Pascal, at least in its standard form, is just plain not suitable for serious programming.  This paper discusses my personal discovery of some of the reasons why.

1.  Genesis This paper has its origins in two events - a spate of papers that compare C and Pascal(1, 2, 3, 4) and a personal attempt to rewrite 'Software Tools'(5) in Pascal.

Comparing C and Pascal is rather like comparing a Learjet to a Piper Cub - one is meant for getting something done while the other is meant for learning - so such comparisons tend to be somewhat farfetched.  But the revision of Software Tools seems a more relevant comparison.  The programs therein were originally written in Ratfor, a ``structured'' dialect of Fortran implemented by a preprocessor.  Since Ratfor is really Fortran in disguise, it has few of the assets that Pascal brings - data types more suited to character processing, data structuring capabilities for better defining the organization of one's data, and strong typing to enforce telling the truth about the data.

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