Working Daze by John Zakour and Scott Roberts for June 15, 2019

PASCAL and FORTH were those new fangled languages that were being taught when I finished my time in the USAF. They said that what I had learned way back when (ALGOL, SNOBOL, LISP, FORTRAN IV, etc. was not being required any more for my degree. I was supposed to just start over again.

The last time I was in a real bookstore with a real computer-book section, I went to look at the programming languages available, and I’d never heard of ANY of them!! They were all for programming phone apps. I retired just in time.

I just about managed basic. I went into a decline after that.

I think the last time I wrote a Pascal program was using Think Pascal on my Mac Plus in 1989 for a class. I programmed in Pascal from 1980 to 1982. I did like it, but in 1983 moved on to C. That was during a stint of commercial programming. I then went back to scientific programming with Fortran 77. Later I programmed in IDL then back to C and MATLAB. One of these days maybe I will learn Python. Maybe.

And I go far enough back to have programmed in Fortran IV, PL/1, IBM 360 Assembler, APL, Apple Basic, 6502, 8080 and Z80 Assemblers. I was going to learn FORTH, because I liked the idea of an extensible language, but never did.Some minor messing around with LISP, Maple V, and Mathematica.

I thought Pascal was a dog that wore futurist sunglasses in this comic

ALGO@UCLA, Bendix G-15, 1962.

If so Jay, you need to go to – www.freepascal.org and www.lazarus-ide.org, it is still out there and even being taught in a few colleges/schools based on occasional questions in Pascal/Delphi areas of Reddit

Pascal was quite large until about 15 years ago with Delphi (had object Pascal as programming language) – however Borland drop the ball and allowed it to stagnate and other languages have moved on a lot (.Net helped by poaching the person responsible for Delphi)

It is nearly a decade since I stopped using Pascal – though there are small things I miss from both the language and Delphi IDE – I don’t see me doing anything serious in it again

My first program was FORTRAN on punched cards on an IBM 1130 in 1970. Didn’t do Pascal for another 2-3 years! Then COBOL, Work10, APL, Ada, Visual Basic.

Oh, yeah! Down memory lane. Ditto on FORTRAN – on an IBM 650 in 1959. ALGOL, PASCAL, PL/1, …

Do computers even understand basic anymore?

not Blaise, then?

I learned Pascal in college and go my first job, because I could program in Pascal. I used it for 10 years.

I remeber Pascal. He was the Cisco Kid’s partner!

I’ll take Cobol or C++

FORTRAN on punch cards was how I learned in college. Upper class men would insert a ‘do’ loop into the card stack of freshmen and instead of a single page of output, they would get 2 feet of “I’m a Dummy.”

you may be an OLD geek.

Pascal? Is he that Brazilian football legend?

Nice rain on the window artwork for reminiscing.

I do remember Pascal getting a BSEET from DeVry. Haven’t used it since.

I was learning C++, then I discovered Visual Basic, and since I was just doing it to learn how to program, I got more enjoyment out of Visual Basic.

I never got into computers or programming. Algol is the “Demon Star” to me not a programming language.

high school memories

Pascal – the class made to fail in Freshman Computer Science. The TA’s were told not to help you

Blaise, the language or the chameleon?