Niklaus Wirth February 1934 - January 1, 2024: A mighty Tōtara has fallen in the forest

#1

( Kua hinga te totara i te wao nui a Tane) ACM Turing award announcement

Wirth’s ‘Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs’ was where I learnt (expressed in pascal) that programming could be both elegant and powerful. (At the time I was scrabbling around in Dartmouth BASIC writing GOTOs all over the place. You mean WHILE could be a language primitive?)

Wirth must be one of the few PL designers who abandoned his own language (Modula) because it had gotten too complex.

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling—the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.
— NIKLAUS WIRTH

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#2

I was also a happy migrator from BASIC to Pascal.

(Pascal was an industrial language! It was the preferred/native language for Classic Mac, i.e., C : Unix system calls :: Pascal : Classic Mac system calls. It still has a relic today: Win16 and Win32 system calls, even though in terms of C, are marked as using the “Pascal calling convention” because Windows started out with borrowing much from Classic Mac. I haven’t checked with Win64.)