[Info-vax] Why so much Unix envy?

[John Reagan]

On Tuesday, September 2, 2014 9:29:27 AM UTC-4, Bill Gunshannon wrote:

> 
> Been there, done that.  Just like people mis-using C, people badly
> mis-used Pascal.  And Wirth tried to fix that by giving the world
> Modula.  And where did that go?  :-)

We almost did a Modula-2 compiler for VAX.  We had a prototype in the techincal languages group but it didn't get final approval.

As for Pascal, Wirth went with Modula, but the Pascal standards committee went to Extended Pascal (ISO 10206 released in 1990 - I was a contributor and the secretary of X3J9).  It tried to fix much of the limitations with classic Pascal.  DEC Pascal has much of the standard (the schema type feature is from EP) but we didn't do the features that had existing Digital extensions to get the same behavior.  We were waiting on other vendors to go first.  Unfortunately, everybody else was waiting as well.  That ends up with nobody doing it.  We also did an addendum to ISO 10206 for Object Oriented features to Extended Pascal.  I don't think anybody did that (well, maybe Prospero Software for their PC compiler - their site hasn't been touched since 2010 as I think Tony (the owner) was looking to retire).