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FPC - GPL, a very complete environment (Lazarus offers a nicer IDE)
P5 Pascal - public domain (fork of one of the original Pascal systems)
GNU Pascal
IP Pascal
etc

All of which are more powerful than VisualBasic and not really any more difficult to use. (my opinion)

FPC - GPL, a very complete environment (Lazarus offers a nicer IDE)
P5 Pascal - public domain (fork of one of the original Pascal systems)
GNU Pascal
IP Pascal
etc

All of which are more powerful than VisualBasic and not really any more difficult to use. (my opinion)

I think you could say the same about Delphi-style Pascal. You can go as low level as in C there

I'd say you are 99% right, but not quite. Pascal has a few abstractions that isolate you from the machine, like the set type for instance.

Yes, it has both high a low level abstractions. I meant that you can go as low level as in C. You indeed don't always have to though.

Also, AFAIK, standard Pascal does not have function pointers,

It does have them: http://www.moorecad.com/standardpascal/iso7185.html#6.6.3.4%20Procedural%20parameters

although I believe many versions, including Delphi, have implemented their non-standard extensions for this.

Delphi did introduce a lot of non-standard extensions to Pascal (and in fact, the way it implemented support for function pointers is different form the ANSI ISO way). Nowadays, Delphi-style Pascal is however one of the most popular variants around and sort of has evolved into a de facto standard.

I learned Pascal in the early 1980s, when the computer I had was an IBM PC with a 4.77 MHz CPU. I did a lot of programming in Turbo Pascal version 3, but I ended learning C because there were some operations I couldn't do with Turbo Pascal. After I learned C, I never felt the need to use Pascal anymore.

I also learned Pascal first, though it was in the 90's. I now also know both Pascal and C, but still prefer Pascal. Keep in mind that Delphi-style/Object Pascal is more than C. It's more like C with the addition of Java-style OOP.

You were lucky. We only had a CDC 6400 in the first years. (See the photo and download the manuals.)

Then we got a 6600, and later the memory was upgraded to 100,000 60-bit words. That's 100,000 octal, or 32,768 words of memory. Wow, the equivalent of 246K of today's bytes! (That's Kilo, not Mega.) If you wanted to run a program that used all the memory, you had to get special permission from the head of IT.

I was working for a research lab, and I wrote a program in Fortran to analyze data to calculate the distance of the center of the universe, based on measurements of the intensity of millimeter wave radiation in outer space. My present analysis of the value of that research is based on how many starving people it fed: 0.

I also did least-squares curve fitting for something we were doing with spectroscopy. I was impressed that the 6600 could invert one of my big matrices in 40 milliseconds.

The computers only cost $4 million each, but we had a staff of 40 people to keep them running. And, of course, the computers had to have their own special air-conditioned room, with a space under the floor for cables.

One of the most amazing facts of human history is how far we have come in only 40 years.

The CDC 6600 had a version of Pong. Only $5,000,000 and 14 people to run and maintain it.

Huh? Since when is Pascal not a useful real-world language? This is the first time I've ever heard this claim.

Since according to ISO pascal:

1. Pascal programs cannot be modular -- they are defined in a single file that starts 'program ;' and continues until the matching 'end' statement. If you are using standard pascal (as most of the universities that used it as a teaching language restricted themselves to), you cannot use 'unit' (which is unsupported in many implementations, being I believe a Borland innovation) or C-style '#include' (which was supported in the implementation at my university, but we were explicitly instructed not to use it).

2. Pascal only recognises a single sized integer type. No longints or shorts or anything like that.

3. Pascal has no means to take the address of a variable (i.e. the equivalent of C's & operator).

4. Pascal does not allow a file to be contained in a structure. They are only allowed to be declared as top-level variables.

5. Pascal does not have any mechanism to open a file with an arbitrary filename. Files are declared as variables, and are implicitly associated with an OS file. Typically, the name used is the same as the variable's name, but this is not standardised. You can (according to the standard) implicitly create files to match those named on the command line (see section 'header files'), but this mechanism isn't widely supported.

Is this enough reason for Pascal (as standardised, and as originally implemented by Wirth) not to be a useful real-world language?

Of course, the variety of extended Pascals available make it a substantially more useful language.

Dave Ahl, who was publisher. retains the copyright to Creative Computing stuff. I plan to put Basic Computer Games, and More Basic Computer Games online eventually. In the mean time these downloadable versions work with with Microsoft basic, but converting them to other languages would be cooler.