CompuServe Messages

I was grabbed by the one phase,"…documented in a more Pascalish or M2ish way" in your missive. I partialy agree with that. For illustrating how to use what's there, psuedo-code is the most flexible method for imparting the necessary basic information. However, a lot of the OS was written in C, and it does seem to be the language of choice for the machine. This does not mean that I endorse Pascal or M2 as the language of to be used when illustrating a point. Strip any of the languages mentioned down to the bones and you have a _lot_ of simularities in grammar and syntax. They all require declaration of variables and are for the most part structured in an almost identical fashion. It seems to me that Pascal and M2 are stricter in their demands on how a programmer goes about doing certain things, while C allows more lattitude. I've always thought of C as being a mid-level language that gives the knowlegable programmer a good idea of what his code is doing at the machine level, while Pascal and son were high-level structured languages. (Wandering a bit, sorry) Since these langages share a great deal in structure, why not use psuedo-code for illustrating algorithms? This lets you write in the language of your choice, without having to translate from a language you have little interest in to the one you use. I'm certain ther have been times you've seen code in C you wanted to port over to M2 and were forced to `dirty your hands' mucking about with it in C. I know I've seen that on my part, only it was Pascal/M2 to C translations that had me reaching for reference books. (Yes, I do know some of the languages, but have not used them enough to certain of some of the more arcane features) Besides, I thought is was the power of the algorithm that makes good programs with all the rest just being bells and whistles, 🙂