I won't proceed to thrash pascal since I have never really done any development in pascal, but the linux/unix development world is dominated by C. If it is not written in C, then the interpreter, byte code interpreter/virtaul machine for the language was likely written in C (perl, tcl/tk, python, java etc etc). C is also the language that gives you the best interfaces for system calls into the low level aspects of unix such as the file systems, I/O etc. If you are going to do any serious development in a Unix environment, you will need to know C.
Pascal and C are so similar in capabilities, the argument presented here is confusing. Except for strings there is no reason, Pascal couldn't directly interface the system calls as C. The free pascal compiler has a C string type and can do just what I suggested (or at least that is what the documentation suggests). The language that the interpreter, compiler or whatever is written in doesn't disprove the viability of languages only proves the flexibility of C. Assuming that's true, free pascal is written in pascal. (Perhaps instead of BSD/Linux where the GNU tools are replaced with BSD tools someone could make a distribution using only Pascal, ADA, etc.) (I don't mean to start a holy war. Considering the author suggested python, tcl/tk, etc. as tools, he obviously doesn't believe C is the best tool for every job. These statements just bothered me.) Dennis Payne dulsi@identicalsoftware.com