That's true. Yet, Wirth's model is worth considering today. In Lilith system, they co-designed a high-level assembler (P-code-like), the Modula-2 language, the compiler, and critical OS regions. Built whole system on that. Key choice, learned from P-code, was to make assembler, high-level language, and compiler all consistent and simple where possible. Allowed easy composition and conversion.

Work on LISP/Scheme, Julia, REBOL, and so on show that even complex constructs can be built with macros, etc on simple ones which can be done Wirth-style as in Lilith/Oberon, my style [1], or by hand like pjmlp said. Actually, the Scheme stuff went down to synthesizing hardware from interpreters written in Scheme and another person did that with a Oberon-based HDL. So, it can go much further. :)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182752

Are you sure? I remember reading something about PL/I. :)

Maybe PL/S, IBM's "secret weapon," (haha) would be better if we're talking C++ replacements. I did like how the language let you describe how exactly the compiler should handle the individual function. I can see that have payoff in OS and security-critical software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PL/S

Interesting, I wasn't aware of it.

Walter has been around a long time. He knows the game. Walter, have you ever used PL/I?

Nope. But Pascal was so simple that a listing for a working subset compiler for it (written in BASIC) was published in BYTE magazine back in the 70s.

But I (and many other compiler devs) thought back in the early 80's that Ada was so complex it was unimplementable. Today that thought seems charmingly naive.

I have spent quite some time in D forums....

EDIT: typo, time was missing