Re: Thinking about Wirth

Random thoughts:

1. I remember Turbo Pascal as one of the best pieces of software ever written. There was another company that took the Turbo language and had an optimizer that would output an executable program that was ALWAYS about 1/2 to 1/3 the size of the same code in Microsoft C. And many times faster.
2. Was it Tony Hoare who described Algol as a language that was better than anything that came after it? I even used Algol/W and PL/360 in my youth!
3. I worked with ADA; it was a nightmare of complexity and bad execution size/time. We should have gone with Pascal! One of th guys at Softech who got the contract to write the compilers for the US Army remarked that they were a year late because the language's generic stuff requried that youn implement the ENTIRE language, and not build on a core.