The reasons that Pascal is less prevalent than C is nothing to do with any linguistic qualities but circumstances.
define circumstances. if its including the fact that pascal is technically less capable than C, then you are right. nobody cares about linguistic if its capable enough.
I mean events, decisions, trends like Unix (which included C compilers) being given away free to universities, universities using that as a basis for some courses, students seeing examples of OS schedulers, utilities and network code all written in C and so on. Circumstances like Sun adopting Unix as the basis for their software strategy. As that person stated, Unix was developed by Bell Labs, which was part of a government-protected monopoly. The Unix OS and the multitude of tools it has were all written in C, therefore wherever Unix will go, C must follow.
Anything you can write in C you can write in Pascal or C# or PL/I or COBOL or APL, yes, even
assembler - they are
all examples of Turing machines.
So if two languages can each be used to convert some input into some output, then how can you compare the languages? How do you define "technically capable"? What is all this "linguistics" stuff? (The joke here is on you, because you can't define "technically capable" without referring to
linguistic properties !
)
nobody cares about linguistics if the language is capable enough.
One of the most amusing oxymorons I've seen this year!
What if we counted the number of buffer overrrun bugs per 1,000 lines of code, for C and Pascal across some reasonable sized sample, would that be a meaningful metric perhaps? an indicator of technical capability?
There is no input text that can be converted to some output
only by using C, if you know of one, please share it.