> Dan Fabulich wrote:
>
> > > Pascal is an evil language built on fascist values and is therefore
> not
> > > extropic.
> >
> > Uh. What? :) Care to say a little more about that?
>
Bryan Moss wrote:
> Imagine you're learning to drive. As your driving instructor I have
> decided
> that the car is too complex a beast for my students to learn. Instead I
> teach you to drive a train. As my first student to learn by train I'm
> very
> pleased to see you're not diverting from your course, unlike my former
> students. You learn quickly and soon you're ready to hit the streets in a
> car. Many people are killed.
>
> Pascal was designed on the premise of teaching programming by restricting
> what the programmer can do. This is both evil and fascist.
>
> BM
>
If pascal is driving a train to learn to drive a car, then C is learning to
drive by being put in the smash up derby, and C++ is learning the same by
being put in a pod-racer from Star Wars - The Phantom Menace!
Cynthia wrote:
Ah, but Object Pascal is Pascal's beautiful daughter.
Right on! Bryan apparently hasn't seen pascal since the early eighties. It's like comparing QBasic to VB (which I do quite frequently as a low down oratorical technique, which is reprehensible really, but then VB deserves it).
Eugene Leitl wrote:
I think Forth provides you with the alternative to do both. In a way,
it's Lisp's ugly duckling sister.
Eugene, you must be a native german speaker; forth could only appeal strongly to people whose natural language uses reverse polish notation! Just kidding, I love rpn myself, I have a section of my brain devoted to rpn which can never be reused. I I forth in programmed have never admit.
To get back to the original "free tools finally available" topic; if you really need free, then you can always go off to unix/linux land, or there's always DEBUG (ha ha).
Emlyn
central thematic statement of VB: "If you can't fix it with a hammer, you
can't fix it"