He has some good points. This one is from a different paper (Good Ideas, Through the Looking Glass):
Designers had ignored both the issue of efficiency and that a language serves the human reader, not just the automatic parser. If a language poses difficulties to parsers, it surely also poses difficulties for the human reader. Many languages would be clearer and cleaner had their designers been forced to use a simple parsing method.
I saw on page 25 (the third PDF page) a nice argument against variable shadowing. I can think of a couple of modern languages I wish had learned this ;)
I think the legend goes Wirth created the Pascal language to be the most easily compilable. To show my age, I recall a class used Modula-2 when I was in college, also from Wirth, very Pascal-like.
Yes, that was a common trend across all programming languages designed by him.
That is also how P-Code came to be, he didn't want to create a VM for Pascal, rather the goal was to make porting easier, by requiring only a basic P-Code interpreter, it was very easy to port Pascal, a design approach he kept for Modula-2 (M-Code) and Oberon (Slim binaries).
I think it was more that it would be easy to write a compiler for, which meant that CS students could write one. Don't have a source for this that I can remember, though.
Designers had ignored both the issue of efficiency and that a language serves the human reader, not just the automatic parser. If a language poses difficulties to parsers, it surely also poses difficulties for the human reader. Many languages would be clearer and cleaner had their designers been forced to use a simple parsing method.
https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-15.2.0/gm2
Even available on compiler explorer to play with, https://godbolt.org/z/ev9Pbxn9K
Yes, that was a common trend across all programming languages designed by him.
That is also how P-Code came to be, he didn't want to create a VM for Pascal, rather the goal was to make porting easier, by requiring only a basic P-Code interpreter, it was very easy to port Pascal, a design approach he kept for Modula-2 (M-Code) and Oberon (Slim binaries).
I think it was more that it would be easy to write a compiler for, which meant that CS students could write one. Don't have a source for this that I can remember, though.