The fixed size array limitation of the 1970 CDC Cyber teaching version usually gets an extension in the (Modula or Modula inspired) versions that people actually use. E.g. -
http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/ref/refsu69.html
https://www.modula2.org/sb/m2_extensions.htm
Yes, I've read "... Not My Favorite ..." (and "Worse is Better", and "Unix ... C ... Hoax")
Re:The Resurgence of C Programming
by AnimalMuppet on Thursday December 29, 2016 @12:09PM
(#13278455)
Yes, I know there was an extension. Unfortunately, the one I had to use didn't have it, so I was trapped.
Perhaps the worst example: The size of an array was part of the type of the array. This means that you couldn't access outside of the array. That was good. It also meant that you couldn't have a variable-sized array, because there was no possible type for it to have! That was really problematic at one particular point when we needed to deal with a variable-sized 2D array. We wound up having to create the maximum size we had memory for, and only use the subset that we needed, which to this day I consider a kludge to deal with a language limitation.
For more, Google for "Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language". Despite being written by Kernighan, it's not a Pascal-vs-C evaluation - it's more Pascal-vs-Ratfor, with Pascal coming off rather badly for real-world use.
For university teaching, though, Pascal was probably better...