Re:Git's list of banned C functions
by JoeAltmaier on Thursday March 04, 2021 @05:22PM
(#26349281)
Mainframes very quickly were outclassed by minicomputers. They could not respond quickly to technology changes as fast. C was indeed king for decades.
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C was not without competition on microcomputers, either. A lot of DOS software was written in Pascal, for example - and it wasn't any slower for that.
Re:Git's list of banned C functions
by Turing_Machine on Thursday March 04, 2021 @09:57PM
(#26351993)
A lot of it was written in Turbo Pascal, which (among many other things that would have caused Niklaus Wirth to break out in hives) let you include inline machine code (and later, inline assembly language).
That's true, but so did C compilers at the time. And most software didn't actually make use of it - they didn't have to, because Turbo Pascal had e.g. pointer arithmetic as powerful as in C.
But anyway, we were talking about the real world software on microcomputers, not just standards in the abstract. With that in mind, I think TP/BP is a better example of Pascal in the wild than anything Wirth ever made.