This sounds like a "Turing Completeness" argument held by a Pascal programmer when hearing about that "cool" language called C a few decades ago.
Ask people who have extensively used both, and they will tell you. C is better. Period. Apples and oranges -- Pascal was invented solely to teach good
On 3/20/2012 9:31 PM, David Bergman wrote: programming practices, C was invented solely as a somewhat higher level language than assembly for doing systems programming. Both were advocated for use well beyond their original intent -- and used successfully. The Turing Completeness argument was an answer to C fanatics who claimed that Pascal was a "toy language" that was incapable of doing things that could be done in C. There were many of us who used both extensively who felt that both had their place. C was better for writing compact efficient programs (though no one doubted that the other contender for a high level systems programming language, BLISS produced much higher performance than any existing C compiler*), while it was easier to write clear, maintainable programs in Pascal. Ultimately C survived largely because of UNIX, while Pascal was superceded by other languages it inspired for the same niche and others (such as ... C). Topher Cooper * I have to admit to some bias on that issue, since I was one of compiler writers for BLISS at DEC, and had been a sometime student of Bill Wulf at CMU before that. However, the level of optization produced by the BLISS compilers (after the original BLISS-10) is pretty indisputable. No credit to me -- we just extended the use of the optimization algorithms developed by Wulf and the grad students he was thesis advisor to, and used them in ports to other hardware.