Comment by 🐙 norayr
Re: "Why did Wirth's languages never see widespread adoption…"
on safety of c code: it is a generated c code. likewise writing in assembly is not safe but assembly generated from oberon or ada is safe. (:
another addition is this example: oberon arrays always have size. even if you expect in the function
when you get str, you know the size. we pass the size as an additional argument, it is visible in c code, but hidden in oberon.
oberon compiler which produces machine code would send an oberon string which is actually a struct with one field for size. well voc also keeps arrays as structs with one field for length.
2024-04-29 · 2 years ago
1 Later Comment
🐙 norayr [mod] · 2024-04-29 at 02:40:
TKurtBond, on package manager, my dream is to be able to
- have lots of 'ports' that can download even this or that forgotten software from this or that university website, patch it, build it and make it available. it is possible, i need to work on it, but of course everybody is invited.
- vipack is designed to work under oberon os. for example its internal interfaces don't know about directories. there is a linux backend which opens the file and returns the descriptor, but nothing in main modules that knows about directories. it tells a function to retrieve lets say this json from the storage, and the storage is abstracted. so i hope i will be able to integrate it with oberon os.
Original Post
Why did Wirth's languages never see widespread adoption besides Pascal? Even Pascal is not used much nowadays outside of Delphi and Lazarus. I tried Pascal myself and I found it to be a nice language structurally, but I also found it to be missing basic features that relate to writing the language itself (example: not being able to insert newlines into strings like you would do in C via '\n'). I also don't like how much "modern" Pascal is centered around just 2 compilers: FreePascal and...