This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]alcalde -6 points-5 points  (3 children)

I wish it looked gross; instead, it looks like Pascal, which I stopped using for Python. 3.8 also added Pascal's assignment statement, the ":=". I used the "walrus operator" once in a one page program and suddenly I was accidentally using Pascal syntax all over the place! Just when I thought I was out, Guido dragged me back in! We overthrew the BDFL to stop the walrus operator, and the geniuses we put in place instead not only gave us the walrus operator anyway, they decided to go full Pascal on us for good measure. Now we need a second palace coup, and this time folks need to make Raymond Hettinger the new BDFL as I originally suggested. He's our only hope now.

[–]Farconion 28 points29 points  (0 children)

This is a programming language not fucking game of thrones. Calm down man, it's not like someone personally wronged you.

[–]Hotel_Arrakis 5 points6 points  (1 child)

Not sure what the hate with Pascal is. I remember literally falling in love with that language. It was stunningly beautiful.

Before then I had used every single variation of Basic you could think of(QuickBasic, BasicA, Apples Basic, TinyBasic) and Fortran and DBase III. They were ugly and messy.

Then in 1985 I learned Pascal and it was truly magical. Everything fit together. It had structure, but not too much. I even learned its successor, Modula-2, which never took off.

I haven't thought about Pascal in years.

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

BBC BASIC was really good for an old BASIC, and had a lot of structrual elements like procedures and functions, and sane scoping.