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The difference is that BASIC was an interpreted language, which was considered to be necessarily non-portable and only useful for teaching and small scale systems. And in fact we have no large software written in pascal (at least the original version). Pascal was designed as a compiled language that could potentially be used to write large scale systems, but had serious limitations in this respect.



> we have no large software written in pascal

What? This isn't true at all. TeX was written in Pascal. The original Macintosh operating system was written in Pascal, then hand-translated into assembly to fit in ROM. Pascal was very widely used in the minicomputer and microcomputer eras, there were absolutely large software programs written in it, many of them.

And yeah if we're going to go with "at least the original version" then you get to ignore all the Pascal written when Turbo Pascal came on the scene. Though I don't see the point in doing that.


I meant to say BASIC instead of Pascal in that sentence.




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