Anno Siegel wrote: > These languages had an axe to grind. They were designed (by Niklas > Wirth) at a time of a raging discussion whether structured programming > (goto-less programming, mostly) is practical. Their goal was to prove > that it is, and in doing so the restrictive aspects of the language > were probably a bit overdone.
This doesn't sound right. That argument might still have been active at the inception of Pascal, I'm not sure. But Pascal *does* have a goto statement, although you were punished a little for using it (numeric labels only, which had to be declared before use). And surely no-one was arguing against structured programming by the time Modula came along, much less Oberon. The restrictiveness of these languages was mainly in the type system, which is quite a different issue. And, as has been pointed out, relaxing the type system of Pascal just a little has resulted in a very successful family of languages (UCSD, Turbo, Apple Pascal, etc.) -- Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
