Jo22 wrote:As far as DOS is concerned, Pascal (+Assembler) was much more relevant than C/C++ ever was.
Pascal was also extremely popular in the intellectual scene (schools, universities, etc.)
I would agree about C++, but don't lump C in there - C was indeed very relevant in the DOS age.
Pascal did somewhat well in the 8-bit world (UCSD, a lot of CP/M stuff, etc. - even Turbo Pascal started out as a CP/M product), but was considered more of a teaching aid than a "serious" language for commercial use. This was somewhat unfair, mostly because Wirth's specifications were very bare-bones, so each vendor had to add proprietary extensions to make the language usable.
Early Pascal implementations for the PC didn't do very well, because they were either virtualized/interpreted (UCSD/Pecan), or were simply slow, bloated and expensive compilers (MS/IBM). It was Borland that single-handedly made Pascal relevant on the PC -- Turbo Pascal was capable, fast (compiled to memory), had a friendly IDE from the get-go, and most importantly it was dirt-cheap compared to the usual price range of programming tools in the '80s. It created somewhat of a revolution in the PC language market in general. No other Pascal was able to compete, so on the PC, "Pascal" came to mean pretty much a single vendor: Borland.
C, on the other hand, was a competitive market. Not on the 8-bit machines (several factors about C's design made it a bad fit for those), but on the PC there were several compilers even early on which were considered quite mature. Lattice C was one of the early ones with lots of third-party library support, Microsoft C also came to be very prominent (included tools like CodeView were especially well-regarded), then of course Borland also joined the fray, and Rational Systems with Instant-C, and then Watcom, etc.
So perhaps there wasn't a single C compiler that enjoyed total dominance like Turbo Pascal in the Pascal market, but on the whole C was both relevant and widespread. If you check out contemporary magazine ads, newsletters and such, there was a huge variety of compilers, third-party libraries, and tools available for C under DOS... probably more than those for Turbo Pascal when taken together, in fact.
Edit: OS writers did use C(++), of course. Because of portability and because they were Geeks.
By contrast, sane people didn't use languages that made them go nuts on their free will. 😉
I don't think portability was a huge concern, especially not for OS development and especially before ANSI C was a thing. If it was, that was more in the tools and utilities market, at least around the time when UNIX (specifically XENIX) was kind of a big deal, or was projected to be. The general opinion was that C offered the best of relatively low-level programming (speed/performance) and high-level programming (structural niceties, flexibility). Even games were being written in C... stuff from Digger through Ultima IV to Keen/Wolf3D/Doom, just to name a few.
Personally C++ does make me go nuts, but C doesn't really. Very different beasts. And are you implying that assembly programmers weren't geeks (or at least a little nuts)? 😁
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