"C" versus Pascal

[Namenloser]

Hatte zufälligerweise gerade vor ein paar Tagen noch einen Text von Niklaus Wirth gelesen, mit einem interessanten Seitenhieb auf C:

Zitat von Niklaus Wirth:

This new compiler, written in Pascal, could not be tested during development, because no Pascal compiler was available yet. The whole program for compiling at least a very substantial subset of Pascal, had to be written without feedback from testing. This was an exercise that was extremely healthy, and it would be even more so today, in the era of quick trial and interactive error correction. After we believed that the compiler was “complete”, one member of the team was banned to his home to translate the program into a syntax-sugared, low-level language, for which a compiler was available. He returned after two weeks of intensive labor, and a few days later the first test programs were compiled correctly by the compiler written in Pascal. The exercise of conscientious programming proved to have been extremely valuable. Never contain programs so few bugs, as when no debugging tools are available!

Thereafter, new versions, handling more and more of Pascal’s constructs, and producing more and more refined code, could be obtained by bootstrapping. Immediately after the first bootstrap, we discarded the translation written in the auxiliary language. Its character had been much alike that of the ominous low-level language C, published a year later. After this experience, it was hard to understand that the software engineering community did not recognize the benefits of adopting a high-level, type-safe language instead of C.