Let's now briefly touch the statement that 'Pascal is a
well-established language'...
The Pascal I used first did not know a thing about objects,
dynamic arrays; operator overloading, nor did it know how to
treat strings, among a number of other things..
Sure, but we have to accept that no matter how well-established it was
before Borland, it was the Borland compilers which usurped the throne
for the sake of a "universal" standard.
And, on the topic of 'adherance to certain rules and philosophies'..
Luckily, people then were not so adamanat about --so called---
Wirthian nature of Pascal... including Wirth himself; just look
at the things Wirth altered in Modula/Oberon series.
So... Not only the 'strict adherance to certain rules' thing
is not cast in stone, but also --it seems-- can change from
one version of the same compiler to the other...
Finally, about 'Pascal is the philosophy, not the syntax'..
As far as I gather, the only philosophy behind Pascal was
to remove ambiguity in written code. And, that's it.
If there is no ambiguity, why worry about whether it
conforms to some mystical/celestial strictness..
Ok, I'll be more specific for those of you who don't see the value in
keeping a type declaration as one unit. I think it greatly reduces
readability to not enforce this type rule. This type rule allows
programmers to expect certain things when reading someone elses or their
own programs. Don't get me wrong--I won't be too broken hearted if this
is changed in an appropriate way, but I'd rather not see code like this:
type
var
procedure
type
And especially if var or procedure uses something defined in the second
type--that breaks top-down design which I think IS an essential
philosophy of Pascal.
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