Late but RIP Niklaus Wirth

1

I know I’m a week late but Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth died on New Years day just short of 90.

Pascal was the second programming language I learned well, after FORTRAN 77. I had small bouts with ALGOL, COBOL, SNOBOL, APL and more in my second programming class in college. Pascal programming was the 3rd class I took. I loved the simplicity of it and for years afterwards I would routinely use (* *) to denote comments in all sorts of documents.

I remember my Pascal professor told of us Wirth’s most famous joke at the beginning of the class.

“Whereas Europeans generally pronounce his name the right way (‘Nick-louse Veert’), Americans invariably mangle it into ‘Nickel’s Worth.’ This is to say that Europeans call him by name, but Americans call him by value.”

It’s stuck with me all these years.

RIP

23 Likes
2

Pascal was an instructional language that somehow went mainstream. (Perhaps thanks to Borland?). IMHO more interesting was Wirth’s Modula-2 which seemed futuristic back in its day.

4 Likes
3

So it’s safe to say that North Americans know the cost of everything and the Wirth of nothing?

Pascal was the second language that I learned. I still have my old Turbo Pascal stuff running (on my iPad, no less) :slight_smile:

RIP to a pioneer

2 Likes
4

Pascal was the second language I learned as well (the first, Fortran as an undergrad).

It was Think Pascal for me, and I used that for the first year of grad school.

Fortran was on a IBM 3033 mainframe, Pascal on a Macintosh 512KE.

It’s been a while.

2 Likes
5

We used a CDC Cyber mainframe for all programming except Assembler which was on a PDP-11 with paper tape. There were some boards that we had to wire wrap stuff on for my hardware classes but I have tried to forget all those.

6

Nice. I never had the pleasure of paper tape, but Computer Fundamentals for Science, the freshmen Fortran course, was with punch cards.

And I had a roommate who was making a music synthesizer, for fun (it was a nerdy school). I remember him wire wrapping 555 chips, among others.

Fun times. :slight_smile:

7

How do you do that on your iPad?

2 Likes
8

I programmed in Turbo Pascal (not the same thing, but a derivative) which I enjoyed a lot. In University I programmed in Modula 2 (I don’t know why I thought it was Modula 4) which had a lot of the same roots. I never made it to Delphi.

Simple yet powerful. He must have been a great engineer.

9

I use an emulator called iDOS. I grabbed it during the brief window it was available on the App Store.

1 Like
10

Yep, mine too, even Pascal was with punch cards!

1 Like
11

I programmed Algol on paper tape, Fortran and BCPL (predecessor to C) on punched cards. No Pascal back then. Far more productive with punched cards unless you have an actual editor program.

1 Like
12

Second language for me, too.

BASIC —> Pascal —> C

We learned Pascal in high school computer labs and AP CompSci. But I disliked it and taught myself C. My undergrad also used Pascal for at least the algorithms class.

While I dislike Pascal something fierce, I respect its creator quite a bit from things I’ve learned about him from writings, speeches, and interviews. I have his Compiler Construction and his Algorithms and Data Structures books. He was a deep thinker in computer science’s pioneering generation.

May he rest in peace.

1 Like
13

My path was Fortran → Pascal → C.

And once I got my MS I was promoted into management and never wrote anymore (production) code.

I do do stuff for fun now and then.

And I too had his books, although a downsizing a few years ago saw me give much of my physical library away.

And yes, may he rest peace.

And just out of curiosity, why does a lawyer have compiler and algorithm books?

14

Good catch and good question. I still, sometime, very rarely, play around with writing code. I once was working on creating docketing software for lawyers and even have a library of date tools posted on GitHub. One of the things I have kept in the back of my mind is writing a rudimentary C compiler. It’s a “someday/maybe” for sure, very far afield of my work. So, I hold on to all these books thinking I may one day open them back up. In truth, it’s probably some psychological malady related to not being able to let go. :smile:

1 Like
15

Ah, yes, I think I have also used that (once) to run my Pascal programs (long ago).

1 Like
16

I’ll always have a soft spot for Turbo Pascal since I had classes in it in high school. While I had taught myself some Basic before that, Turbo Pascal was the first language I was really taught and could write non-trivial programs in.

1 Like
17

That is sad news. I like Pascal for quick and dirty jobs although a product that I help with on the R&D side was over 100K lines of VAX Pascal. Also did a little work in Modula-2 and Oberon.

For my Masters thesis I wrote an experimental optimiser for DEC-10 Pascal but as DEC cancelled the Jupiter project soon afterwards there was no way to exploit my hackery. For who understand these things it optimised using valaue numbers within basic blocks; today I would do it different. (And these days more interested in how to optimise Algol-68! I have a68g running on my Macs.)

18

This news hit me last week – I’m not a programmer despite multiple false starts over the years. The closest I ever came was when I was a young teen playing a game called Runescape. There was a “botting” tool that played the game for you called SCAR, and it was scripted in Pascal. I was able to whip together some pretty useful scripts to automate actions in the game, and even went on to write a number of tutorials to help others do the same. It was the most useful thing I ever created with code, so that’s saying something :slight_smile:

19

In my Computer Science Programming II course in 1985, I used three different Pascal compilers: Waterloo Pascal (IBM 4381 VM/CMS), UCSD p-system (Apple //e), and Turbo Pascal 2.0.

I still have copies of Wirth’s Pascal: User Manual and Report and Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs on my bookshelf.

2 Likes
20

Absolutely! A loss for sure. The first language I learned formally. And even used it professionally for a bit in the 90s. And of course Borland Turbo Pascal.