dajava <dajava@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> HI,
>
> Computer Science majors used Pascal for about 2 year
> then began to use C when I was a student - more than 20 years ago.
>
>
> I heard that CS majors use C++ as their first language these days.
>
> Any ideas?
>
One case (math, not CS but still should give you some idea). We used
Turbo Pascal in introductory programming course (compulsory for all
math students). However, around 1994 we had some 32-bit machines
with 1-4 Mb of RAM. On such machine it felt really clumsy to live
with 16-bit limitations imposed by DOS and Turbo Pascal. So
we investigated possible upgrade paths. One possibility considered
was Delphi. But the message about Delhi was somwhat unclear for us
-- we did not know how compatible it was with real Pascal (now we
know it is compatible enough). The only sure thing about Delphi we
knew was that Delphi requires Windows, and that was big minus.
Also, in-compatibility of various Pascals was a problem -- we
wanted to use Linux, but have source code ****tablity to Windows.
C (not C++, just plain C) + emacs deliverd maybe not so great
but reasonable emvironment giving us ****tabliity for studnets
programs.
At that time both Free Pascal and GNU Pascal were unknow to us
-- if had to abandon some Pascal dialect now we would probably
switch to one of them. But made our choice 1994 (the switch
to C was implemented in 1997, but needed time to prepare for
for the switch).
Let mention another motivation: we hoped that we could cover
_all_ our programming needs using C. It turned out that
we use many languages -- we still use Pascal for some courses,
Matlab (and Octave), Maple, Mathematica, C++, Java, Perl,
Visual Basic ...
--
Waldek Hebisch
hebisch@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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