Photo use courtesy of The Computer History Museum http://www.computerhistory.org
Photo use courtesy of The Computer History Museum http://www.computerhistory.org
Photo use courtesy of The Computer History Museum http://www.computerhistory.org
Photo use courtesy of The Computer History Museum http://www.computerhistory.org
One of the questioners from the Q&A session turned out to be D. E. Knuth !
His question was if Pascal was originally conceived as a non-recursive language ! Wirth replied that it was true, that the original machine he planned to run Pascal on was not ideal for recursive languages, but they worked it out, and there never was a non-recursive version of Pascal.
Photo use courtesy of The Computer History Museum http://www.computerhistory.org
Wirth was asked after the lecture what he thought of the rise of C/C++. He said he was very glad that subject had not come up during the Q&A period, which I think says it all. I asked him how he felt about the computing professions move away from type safe languages like Pascal to languages like C/C++. He replied that he believed the profession was moving back in the other direction, via languages like Java and C#.