XPost: alt.folklore.computers
From: commodorejohn@gmail.com

On Mon, 5 Jan 2026 20:37:59 -0700
Peter Flass  wrote:

> > However it WAS easy to extend the language - add in those Real
> > World necessities. By the time Turbo Pascal hit the scene there
> > really wasn't anything you could not do with Pascal.
> >
> > And I still write in Pascal fairly often - like it better than 'C'.
>
> I'm not sure to what extent there was an attempt early on to
> standardize the extensions, but this would have helped adoption of
> the language immensely.

Yeah, that's the thing - anyone can extend a language by disregarding
the original spec, changing what they don't like and adding what they
want, and (re-)writing a compiler that adheres to their version, but
then you have a different version with which the original language/
implementation is not compatible (and which may not even be a strict
superset.) Get enough of those floating around, and it's the ol' Babel
problem. That's not insurmountable (just look at how many microcomputer
BASICs there were, and yet there was enough mutual intelligibility for
people to publish books of computer games in source form, with tips in
the back for tweaking things to run on particularly esoteric versions,)
but it sure does make extra work for programmers :/

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