Thomas E. Kurtz has died

What’s curious is how one of the reasons Pascal was derided was due to the limitations of the original system followed by the incompatibilities of the implementations that reached the market.

Meanwhile, BASIC, which I think it could be argued was the backbone of the mini and micro computing industry for 20 years, was all over the map in terms of implementation and features.

None of the BASICs I used were compatible outside the fundamentals of expressions and the core data types, and even then they all handled strings differently.

It seems to me that people had different levels of expectations for BASIC and Pascal.

BASIC was a teaching language. Yeah, people pushed it to write production systems, but it was still a jumped-up teaching language, and everybody knew it. People did serious work with it, but it was still a "toy" language. If you had a serious program written in BASIC, it wasn't expected to be portable.

Pascal started as a teaching language, too, but it got taken more as a "serious" language. (To be fair, it did have far better control constructs than BASIC...) It got hyped as a "serious" language. But it wasn't able to reach the bar set by those expectations, for the reasons you state.

Could you have written the same applications in Pascal that were written in BASIC? Almost certainly. Would you have been better off doing so? Definitely.

Maybe the difference was, BASIC was more approachable - it was something a 10-year-old could tinker with. Pascal was more a thing that college kids could tinker with. So Pascal had higher expectations. The same kind of limitations were more a violation of the expectations.

The difference is that BASIC was an interpreted language, which was considered to be necessarily non-portable and only useful for teaching and small scale systems. And in fact we have no large software written in pascal (at least the original version). Pascal was designed as a compiled language that could potentially be used to write large scale systems, but had serious limitations in this respect.

> we have no large software written in pascal

What? This isn't true at all. TeX was written in Pascal. The original Macintosh operating system was written in Pascal, then hand-translated into assembly to fit in ROM. Pascal was very widely used in the minicomputer and microcomputer eras, there were absolutely large software programs written in it, many of them.

And yeah if we're going to go with "at least the original version" then you get to ignore all the Pascal written when Turbo Pascal came on the scene. Though I don't see the point in doing that.

I meant to say BASIC instead of Pascal in that sentence.