basic - continued

[Joep L. Blom]

sdavmor wrote:
> Joep L. Blom wrote:
>> Amedee Van Gasse (ub) wrote:
>>> On Tue, February 9, 2010 02:26, Christopher Chan wrote:
>>>> On Tuesday, February 09, 2010 02:17 AM, Rafiq Hajat wrote:
>>>>> Not Linus. Gnu/Linux was, if I understand correctly, started
>>>>> by Richard Stallman in the early 1980's.
>>>> GNU software first ran on Solaris. RMS and gang tried to build
>>>> a kernel for the GNU environment and are still trying (HURD -
>>>> okay, a microkernel but whatever) or at least some one from the
>>>> GNU foundation is still trying.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> Tero Pesonen
>>>>>
>>>>> Is that really true? I always thought that Linus Torvald was
>>>>> the originator of Linux, a term which comprised an
>>>>> amalgamation of his name and Unix (which is still used by the
>>>>> banks as the most secure OS on the planet). Am I totally off
>>>>> track?
>>>> No. Linux is from Linus Torvald but it is just a kernel. Not
>>>> enough to make an operating system. That is where GNU comes in.
>>>>
>>> Linux only became popular because Andy Tanenbaum didn't want to
>>> add features to Minix, and because BSD was slowed down by
>>> lawsuits at the time. If it weren't for the lawsuits, we would
>>> have had a *real* Unix (BSD) kernel, combined with the GNU tools.
>>> Nobody would have talked about Linux.
>>>
>>>
>> I second that. Tannenbaum was professor at the VU (Free University)
>> in Amsterdam and had MINIX developed originally as an exercise in
>> OS development for students just as Wirtz (Switzerland) had
>> developed PASCAL for tutoring High school students. Both are/were
>> however so good that they were used in much wider circles, PASCAL
>> is a much better ( and stricter) language that C which also
>> originally not was developed as a language but as a "sack of
>> subroutines" by Kernigan & Richie (the in Bell Labs) to write a
>> better OS that the then used RSTS on a DEC PDP-11. They called that
>> OS UNIX. Joep
> 
> I loved PASCAL. A fine structured programming langauge. And I was very
> impressed by MINIX. I had Tannenbaum's book on MINIX way back when.
> Thought it was very cool.

Well, it is still available now in the form of Lazarus which actually is 
a Delphi clone, which in my opinion is only en environment around Pascal 
for rapid development. Ine of the most common errors in C-derived 
languages is buffer overflow, which is actually not possible in PASCAL 
(although you could force it!!).
Joep