Pascal user manual and report

What Hacker News says

1. jonjackyMay 2020
   I learned Pascal by reading an equivalent book ...

   Jensen and Wirth, Pascal User Manual and Report. Springer. Silver cover. Typeset in typewriter font. Syntax presented both in BNF and graphic 'railroad track' diagrams. Very short, even though it was two books in one: the tutorial User Manual and the reference Report. Very very clear and well-written.

   The ideal in those days was one book that was complete and authoritative and also instructive - if you knew that book, you knew the language. K&R (1978) is the famous example but Jensen and Wirth preceded it (1974).

   Show morethread
2. WalterBrightJan 2024
   > in the sense that the limitations and exclusions of the language design were precisely what made compact implementations possible and widely successful.

   All of the Pascals that were widely successful extended the language in key ways. I was an initial fan of Pascal, until I discovered that a large amount of my time was spent trying to work around limitations of the language.

   With C, those workarounds disappeared and I was far more productive.

   (I know C compilers always have numerous extensions, most of them of dubious value, but still, plain C remains a far, far more useful language than the Pascal of "Pascal User Manual and Report". Which is why C buried Pascal.)

   Show morethread
3. pjmlpJan 2024
   Pascal also has had numerous extensions.

   No one used Pascal of "Pascal User Manual and Report" from 1976.

   Strangley compiler extentions are only cool when talking about C, in fact, most C developers have no idea what ISO C is actually all about.

   thread
4. unscaledJan 2024
   Borland did keep supporting Pascal in addition to C++ then, no? They introduced Object Pascal with Turbo Pascal 5.5 IIRC, and later kept extending that with Delphi. As far as I know, their strategy was playing both Pascal and C++ up through the bitter end with Delphi and C++ Builder. I don't know which of them, C++ or Pascal/Delphi, but Delphi was certainly popular enough at its heyday.

   Obviously, Object Pascal was a very far cry from the Pascal User Manual and Report, and even at its extended version it was strictly less powerful than C++, so your point still stands. But it was more beginner-friendly. In my opinion, the moment you got beyond the basics (no pun intended), it was friendlier than BASIC or Visual Basic, while far more powerful. That was quite a sweet spot.

   Once I felt comfortable with C++, I couldn't go back to Pascal. Even with the extensions, there were some things that were too painful for me like lack of RAII, lack of Generics, short strings by default. Perhaps some of these are addressed by Free Pascal or modern versions of Delphi nowadays, but that ship has sailed. I feel like Pascal with its extensions worked great in the 1980s and 1990s, and I have very fond memories of my time using it, but it just doesn't have much to offer anymore. There are other beginner friendly languages out there that are powerful enough and have better tooling and far larger communities. And it was all about the tooling and community all along.

   Show morethread
5. lispmAug 2023
   "Lisp Lore: A Guide to Programming the Lisp Machine" by Bromley&Lamson was also written using Concordia AFAIK. The Symbolics documentation also has Jensen&Wirth "Pascal User Manual and Report" and Harbison & Steele, C: A Reference Manual.
   thread
6. retrocryptidJul 2023
   Meh. Python is for scientists. Lisp is for engineers. Which is to say the languages were designed for different language design methodologies. In the old days of Lisp we didn't have large libraries of pre-existing functionality, so it was important for programmers to know how to construct complex functions from simple functions. But now we have python with its expansive partially documented standard and semi-standard libraries. You don't need to know how to rewrite that lump of functionality. You just need to know how to write small test programs that verify you understanding of how it's supposed to be used. And if you find you need to do something that's not supported, you just change what it is you're trying to do.

   The flip side of this is that there's a large corpus of programs demonstrating idiomatic python. "There's only one way to do it," was a mantra I heard from Pythonistas in the 2000s. Maybe it's still a cultural value in that community. That would explain the large corpus (that and it being a popular language.)

   I've yet to see a LLM spit out even half-way decent Lisp (CL, scheme or even e-lisp). My suspicion is the corpus of available code is small and its language features tend to generate less "boilerplate."

   Having taught "practical lisp" in the 90s, SICP was frustrating because of its insistence on describing idiomatic Lisp in text, but with far fewer examples than comparative texts in other languages (k&r c or PASCAL User Manual and Report.)

   There seems to be a tradition of this in Scheme and CL books. Where you could easily find books in the 80s entitled "${N} PROGRAMS IN BASIC" or some such, which were useful to provide a corpus of idiomatic code learners could use to build an intuitive understanding of the language. In the Lisp world no such books were available, and members of that community seemed to want learners to develop a wholly rational approach to learning.

   So... if your purpose is to have a language that can be generated by ChatGPT, definitely pick Python. My experience with automated tools is they absolutely do not understand how to refactoring lisps effectively.

   Show morethread