[Info-vax] Better languages than BASIC

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Fri, 12 Jan 2024 12:15:24 +0100, Marc Van Dyck wrote:

> Amazing that in current programming languages discussions, PASCAL is
> never mentioned anymore.

Standard Pascal was little more than a toy, useful for teaching but not a 
lot more.

To make it useful you needed some serious extensions. But that’s where 
things diverged. Look at VAX Pascal (v2 or later) and you see things like 
external symbols, structure layout control and arguments by keyword, which 
made it great for system programming on VMS.

Outside the DEC world, there was UCSD Pascal, with an entirely different 
(and incompatible, and less ambitious) set of extensions. That became kind 
of a de facto standard in the PC world, with Turbo Pascal copying the same 
set of extensions, for example.

One project that still lives on is Free Pascal
<https://www.freepascal.org/>, which aims to be compatible with UCSD/
Turbo.