About a decade later, said manager retired and confessed that the choice
of Pascal was a mistake
There's Pascal and there's Pascal. Standard Pascal, I admit, is woefully
unsuitable for real world work. But Pascal with suitable extensions was
good enough for the first 6 generations of the Macintosh operating system
and key applications, at a time when *nobody* was even coming close to
doing what the Mac was capable of. (Admittedly, a certain number of the
core OS libraries, most famously Quickdraw, were handwritten in assembly
by a real genius.) By the mid-80s, Apple's SANE (Standard Apple Numeric
Environment) was quite possibly the best environment for doing IEEE-754
numeric work anywhere. But of course, Macintoshes were toys, right, and
got no respect, even when the Mac G4 was the first PC powerful enough to
be classified by US export laws as a supercomputer.
[Disclaimer: Pascal on the Mac might have been far ahead of the pack when
it came to supporting IEEE-754, but it didn't have the vast number of
(variable-quality) Fortran libraries available on other systems. And
while it is true that the G4 was classified as a supercomputer, that was
only for four months until the Clinton administration changed the laws.
Apple, of course, played that for every cent of advertising as it could.]
