On 24/09/2014 16:06, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 24/09/14 15:46, Tim Streater wrote:
In article , The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 24/09/14 14:34, Tim Streater wrote:
In article , Tim Lamb
wrote:

In message , Huge
writes
On 2014-09-24, Tim Streater wrote:

Since I have 15k lines of working PHP I'm not about to rewrite it.

Reasonable.

I'm beginning to regret starting this thread:-)

I agree there's a danger of descending into language or platform wars
but we've manfully avoided that.

let's just say that all languages are in essence crap, and some are
even more crap than most. But they are all faster to write than
assembler.

+1

And even a crappy language can be persuaded to do what you want,
unless its pascal* of course.

*the only language I couldn't find a way to take an arbitrary 265bytes
of data, and look at the first few bytes to see what it was, and hence
what to do with the rest.

Pascal dont like casts one little bit.

In standard Pascal, there is no "return" statement, and each string of
different length is a different type.

That was the killer.

I needed to make a Union of every possible type of disk sector one might
in fact encounter,

That seemed to be beyond TurboPascal.

Sure it was turbo? Since its trivially easy in any PC based version of
turbo pascal (it supports free union variant records, generic pointers,
dynamic C style memory allocation, untyped arrays or "array of byte"
style constructs, and it quite happy to let you index beyond the end of
arrays etc so long as you turn off range checking). I have never tried
one of the older CP/M versions though.

(you may well have had difficulties in other more "standard" flavours of
pascal like Prospero or UCSD etc)




--
Cheers,

John.

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