Top 10 reasons why Pascal is better than C
1. Pascal, noble language as it is, was named after a famous French
mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal. C was named after a
Sesame Street character.
2. Pascal's inventor, Nicholas Wirth, and parameter passing conventions
coalesce to form a nifty pun: You can pronounce his name by reference: Wirth
or by value: Worth. C was invented at Bell Labs, where they wouldn't know a
joke from a transistor.
3. There is only one Pascal, as defined by Wirth, while C has (shall we say?)
several fathers: Kernighan & Ritchie, Harbison & Steele, Barnum & Bailey, and
Laurel & Hardy.
4. In C, the following variable names are all different: thesame, TheSame,
theSame, and THESAME. Nuff said.
5. In Pascal, when you fool with a pointer or handle, you know you're fooling
around with a pointer or handle. In C, you could be fooling around with anything.
C is the ultimate language for computational promiscuity.
6. In Pascal, we *know* how big an integer is.
7. C is used by liberal, Democratic, Mike Dukakis types of programmers.
Pascal is a favorite of the GOP. Hey, we know what the big language at
Berkeley is, don't we?
8. C is the only language in the civilized world that still refuses to recognize
the $ sign for a hexadecimal constant and continues to promote that base
pretender to the throne: 0x00.
9. Pascal has well-defined rules for Scope, while C appears to be using Listerine.
This accounts for the medicine breath of many C programmers.
10. In C, you can do this:
Code:
for(;P("\n").R-;P("|"))for(e=3DC;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);
In Pascal, you CAN'T do this :
Code:
for(;P("\n").R-;P("|"))for(e=3DC;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);
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Copyright ©1998 Owen Hartnett
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