RIP Niklaus Wirth, inventor of Pascal.

[michaelk]

Just learned that Niklaus Wirth passed away on January 1, 2024.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth

 

You could argue that Vectorworks wouldn't be what it is without him.

[Pat Stanford]

I would do far more than argue that Vectorworks wouldn't be the same, I would insist on it.

 

I believe that the original MiniCAD code was all written in Pascal and only much later converted to C.

 

Vectorscript was originally named MiniPascal.

 

The bones of VW were forged on the back of Pascal and Wirth.

 

RIP

[michaelk]

16 minutes ago, Pat Stanford said:

I believe that the original MiniCAD code was all written in Pascal and only much later converted to C.

 

It was.  I met Richard Diehl once and he told me about writing the original MiniCad in a version of Pascal (Turbo Pascal??) that would compile on his (I think…) Mac 512.

[Pat Stanford]

I think it was early enough in the Mac life, that it had to be Apple Pascal under the Lisa Workshop.

 

Turbo Pascal was not ported to Mac until 1986 around the same time as the Macintosh Programmers Workshop (MPW) was released.

 

There was also a Macintosh Pascal that was interpreted instead of compiled (very similar to Vectorscript/MiniPascal) that was Apple Branded, but written by THINK. This was later expanded to a compiled version and released as THINK Pascal.

 

And I actually used most of these. At least to play with a little. 🤦‍♂️

[Sam Jones]

Back in 1992, I was asked by my lighting faculty to see if PowerCAD or MiniCAD 4+ could do what we desperately needed, talk to an outside database.  As far as we  knew that functionality did not exist, anywhere.  We didn't have that much experience, and there might have been a LISP implementation in AutoCAD 9 at the time, but we had not heard of it.  I took both home.  I saw in the manual that MiniCAD 4+ had the functionality of link text to record and macro language that was a superset of PASCAL.  I knew PASCAL, and it had Readln and WriteLn.  We never looked back and implemented the first functional lightplot that could talk to a database, Panorama at the time.  Later, as soon as Lightwright was ported to the Mac, we talked to LW.

Arguably, that made MiniCAD and vectorworks dominate in the entertainment industry.  The rest of the rest of the functionality in Vectorworks was whipped cream.  With all its flaws, and there are several, I love PASCAL.

[MullinRJ]

In my first post-college job, some 40+ years ago, I chose to learn Pascal over Fortran to complete an assignment. I have never looked back. I am amazed that after all these years I still use Pascal as a productive tool. Pascal is like my favorite pair of jeans – they still fit, so I still wear them. I've learned and used other languages and see their benefits, but Pascal will always be closest to my heart. Thank you Niklaus Wirth. Bon Voyage.

[Thomas W]

Rest In Peace Niklaus Wirth.

 

I started my first VectorScript exercises a little over a year ago thanks to you and this forum and I am very happy to have done it!

I hadn't done any programming before (apart from a week of Basic on MO5 in 1985!) and I really found this structured programming interesting and instructive.

The fact that this language from the 1970s is still used surely says a lot about its creation and its creator, thank you to him and long life to its language.