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From: "JOG" <jog@cs.nott.ac.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory
Subject: Re: Beautifiul Mind: Thinking about Dijkstra
Date: 28 Apr 2006 06:06:54 -0700
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x wrote:
> "David Cressey" <dcressey@verizon.net> wrote in message
> news:0jn4g.5128$7c.4397@trndny01...
> >
> > "Rich Ryan" <rryan@cshore.com> wrote in message
> > news:5kb4g.11880$%m4.8463@newssvr33.news.prodigy.com...
> > > I'm a programmer from the mid 70's. At that time the language of choice
> > was
> > > Pascal and I think PL1. Both were very expressive in an algothrimic way.
> > The
> > > seminal work was "A Discipline of Programming".  And also ""The Elements
> > of
> > > Programming Style" ala Strunk and White.
> > >
> > > Rich
> > >
> > >
>
> > In the mid '70s,  I was doing some extracurricular programming in Algol.
> I
> > didn't run across Pascal until 1980.  A few years later,  I ran across a
> > book,  "Pascal with Style".  Very good book.  I think we should be
> teaching
> > elements of style to beginnig programmers.
>
> In the '70s I was learning to speak :-)
> I didn't run across Pascal until 1988.
> If it were hard, I might have stumbled on it earlier. :-)
>
> > I think Pascal was (is) a good language.  I wish there were a language
> that
> > does for OOP what Pascal did for structured programming.
>
> Almost everyone here learned programming by using Pascal since it was
> available.
> These years it was proposed to replace it with Oracle :-).

Pascal was and is a great language, and the first I learnt. I wish it
was still taught at an undergraduate level as an introduction to
programming instead of Java, which, as an educational tool, is
disastrous.