Article from _Computer Language_ by Bruce Tonkin. Several prominent software companies have caused a stir lately by dropping all development work in Pascal and adopting Microsoft BASIC. When queried all have declined to comment about this move, but one company insider (code-named Deep Poke) suggested talking to Niklaus Wirth to get the full story. Speaking from his home in Zurich, Switzerland, Wirth proved to be a far more genial soul than one might imagine, being the founder of Pascal and all. But the European lifestyle obviously agrees with him, and he was more than willing to provide some insights into this strange phenomenon, currently taking place in the computer industry. In fact, what began as an innocent inquiry eventually revealed a shocking and exclusive piece of information: that the invention of Pascal nearly 20 years ago was intended entirely as a joke, an April Fools' prank. Wirth tried to explain. "Every year at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology [the university in Zurich where Wirth is a professor of computer science] I taught the same classes, gave the same tests, told the same jokes," he began. "it was boring. I needed a little humor. So I started talking about this crazy language called Pascal. Eventually, the Pascal joke became so popular I just kept adding to it, making it more and more elaborate. "But some of the students went to class so seldom that they missed the joke and thought Pascal was a real language! Imagine the looks on their faces when they got out into the world and discovered there was no such thing as a language called Pascal. Hoo-boy! They sure learned to pay attention after that!" he said, giggling. Several of his better students, he continued, figured they'd make some money by fleecing the people who actually believed in Pascal and so wrote a simple Pascal compiler for this purpose. It was actually a kind of prank, much like selling elevator passes to high school freshmen. "Yes, yes," Wirth said, "the UCSD operating system started the same way. The same bunch of rascals who did the whole Pascal thing kept pushing the idea until it reached the point of complete absurdity. They were hysterical! Especially late at night - they'd come up with some really boffo material. They the next week they'd modify it and it would get even more entertaining." Wirth's best student was Philippe Kahn, who he met while Kahn was a student. "I used to go to a small bistro called 'Der Blaue Engel' after my classes, and it happened that Kahn played jazz saxophone there while people danced on the tables." Wirth was impressed with Kahn's talent and evident wit and encouraged him to end his musical career and enter the lucrative field of software comedy. Once he explained Pascal's comedic possibilities, Kahn was hooked and quickly agreed. Since most of the staff at Apple Computer Inc. was educated at the University of California at San Diego, they were also in on the joke, Wirth said. "That's why they kept pushing Pascal. A bunch of fine kids, those Apple guys. Born comedians, most of them. Except this one guy - he had no sense of humor at all. [Editor's hint: not Woz.] "When we finally decided to do a DOS that was even funnier than UCSD Pascal, the feeling was that UCSD was already the ultimate. But then one of the guys proposed doing a DOS that was written in Pascal but used hieroglyphics instead of a written language. What a genius! We were rolling in the aisles. But that one guy, he thought we were serious. What a nerd!" Wirth's list of the funniest features of Pascal begins with the lack of a string data type, no random file access, primitive numeric handling, and the existential absurdity of the semicolon. "But I'd have to say that my crowning achievement was the lack of input and output functions. First you can't get anything in too easy. And once it's in, you can't do much with it. Pascal isn't good with letters and it's not good at all with numbers. Besides, I made it very picky. You have to recompile, recompile, recompile forever. Ha! And once you've done something with the data, you can't get it out." Wirth started chuckling uncontrollably. "Philippe has said C is a write-only language - I made Pascal a read-only language!" His chuckling turned into hysterical laughter that went on for several minutes. "Of course, some didn't get the joke," he finally said when he could speak again. "They kept trying to make Pascal actually useful. But I stopped them; I made the original Pascal a standard. That meant anyone who made Pascal good for anything was nonstandard and out on a limb!" * * * * * How will all this affect the future of Modula-2? Wirths' merry manner and beaming face suddenly became hard when presented with this question; perhaps this was taboo territory, sacred subject matter. "Modula-2 is a real language," he finally said, his demeanor solemn. "It represents a serious effort on my part to make amends for any damage caused by well-meaning but unimaginative people teaching and learning Pascal. "But it's so hard! Pascal is a very good joke, yes? But to make a really good language from it is not so easy," he sighed. In addition to Pascal, Wirth admitted, three other languages also were intended as pranks: Forth, PL/I, and True BASIC. "Forth is essentially black humor," Wirth said. "Charles Moore [who created the language in the late 1960s] designed it as a native language for people whose brains ran backward." Originally, he continued, it was supposed to be the ultimate parody of Hewlett-Packard calculators, which Moore has been competing with unsuccessfully for years. As an astronomer, he had used HP's calculators out of necessity rather than any appreciation for their design. But to his great surprise, he found that there were actually quite a few people whose brains did run in reverse. Eventually, Moore came to see Forth as a boon, especially for backward thinkers. "At least it keeps them of the streets out of really serious trouble," Wirth said. "Imagine one of them trying to drive a car or operate heavy machinery!" PL/I originally stood for "Prostituted Language/Interface," Wirth explained. "The designers were under so much pressure to add features and include every possible construction from every other language in existence that they eventually gave up and decided to play the whole thing for laughs. They said 'yes' to every request, no matter how absurd, and even added things to the language no one ever could or would use. The scoured journals for off-beat syntax and weird symbolic notation; some of their better ideas came from early editions of The Mad Reader and other E. C. publications. Besides, several of them were upset with the compiler-writing team and decided to stick it to them with a life-time project." True BASIC is not "True" in the sense most people understand the word, Wirth continued. Rather, "True" is itself an acronym for a "Totally wRecked-Up Example of." The professors who came up with it are amazed that no one has yet caught on to the joke; they felt sure their insistence on the LET keyword would be a dead giveaway. "Of course there were other clues, but this was the most clear-cut," Wirth said. "They even called Microsoft BASIC a street BASIC in hopes that Bill Gates would challenge them and reveal the joke." But Gates refused to play along, and both professors had to all but beg Wirth to tell the world the truth about True BASIC before things went any further. * * * * * Jokes abound in the world of operating systems as well, according to Wirth. In addition to the UCSD Pascal operating system, said Wirth, "Tandy, Apple, and Commodore were for a number of years carrying out a private comedic battle to see who could produce the world's funniest DOS." Tandy's TRS-DOS (Tandy Radio Signal Detection Operating System - a reference to the fact that early machines would reboot when any transmitted signal was detected) was an early front-runner until Apple came out with the vary amusing Control-D command what could enable or disable disk operations. In the end, though, Commodore won the battle. Its DOS was oriented toward records exactly the size of punch cards and took over four minutes to boot from disk since it read disk data more slowly than most audio tape machines and even some 300-baud modems. But the funniest joke of all is, in Wirth's estimation, also the most common, and he's amazed so few people have caught on to it yet. "Come on, come on. Surely you can guess," he said, his voice rising in excitement. "What one thing makes users more livid than any other? What one computer product makes you feel sure it was produced by a team of trained gerbils on mind-altering drugs? Yes, yes, yes! You see it now - manuals!" Wirth considers Gates, who wrote all the BASIC manuals and who was on the staff of many others, a "comic genius." "Mitch Kapor should get more recognition - he's far better than Neil Simon. And what's-his-name, the guy who wrote the WordStar manual - he got an award at at dinner we threw for him a few years back. That manual is a classic in the truest Marxist [brothers] sense of the word! Pure slapstick! But the best of them all is the author of the dBase II manual. Now there is a writer for the ages!" As for the IBM manuals, Wirth considers them mere hack work. "Anyone can do stuff like that," he snorted. But perusing a copy of the manual for NEWDOS, he seemed a little more impressed. "Hmmmm. Not bad work. Not bad at all," he said. "But it's still simple stuff. 'To do this, read page 40. But to know what's on page 40, you have to read page 65, which refers to page 15, which shows a whole list of exceptions for page 53.' Entertaining, but hardly in the class of any of the modern masters of the art." But when his attention was brought to the fact that none of the error numbers listed in the NEWDOS manual were ever returned to the BASIC programmer, and that the most common disk setup (double-density, double-sided) was not on the configuration menu, Wirth admitted that these were indeed nice touches. Although it is a known fact that most of the early computer manuals (probably even the NEWDOS manual) were written by programmers and that programmers are notoriously poor writers, Wirth would not be deterred from his opinion that these writings are works of art. "Most people fail to consider that good programmers are very bright. Their thoughts are extremely well organized and most of them have the benefit of higher education. Their brains are not warped by overexposure to TV and their attention spans are not short-circuited by overindulgence in sex, drugs, or alcohol. They are not constrained by conventionality. If you want to get picky, there are a lot more programmers than there ever were writers. And programmers simply work harder than writers. Few writers work 100 hours a week; almost all programmers do." The result, according to Wirth? "All programmers write at least as well as Faulkner. Most are as good as Proust, and about a third are as good as Dickens. Several hundred are at least as good as Shakespeare. So the manuals you thought were inferior were simply beyond your poor ability to appreciate. If you were a programmer, you would delight in their verbal virtuosity," he said. In fact, Wirth claimed, even the grammatical errors and misspellings in the manuals were placed there deliberately. Most are elaborate literary allusions and puns; some are inventive Joycean neologisms. As an example, Wirth discussed the history of the word "kernal." "Everyone, including programmers, knows the word is spelled k-e-r-n-e-l," he explained. "The deliberate misspelling is an implied criticism of the typesetter (a writer's bane for years.) Of course typesetters kern the letter l; thus, 'kern el.' But kerning can only be done for certain letter combinations, such as two l's. Thus, 'kern a l' dares the typesetter to kern an isolated l, an obvious typographic impossibility. "Moreover," he continued, "'kernal' is an anagram for 'rankle,' which describes programmers' feelings toward typesetters. Finally the inventor of this particular word, R. K. Lane (who is well known within the Southern California computer community) has concealed his name by means of yet another anagram." Wirth smiled a last secretive smile, leaving us all to wonder if this was perhaps just one more in his series of personal computer pranks. .