Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but as best I remember I always lamented the verbosity of Pascal (I worked professionally for a time in Turbo Pascal). Modulo-2 was IMhO a much better language and had he used that, revised with a more concise syntax a-la C/C#/Rust, I think I would have been a lot happier. (I must resist the urge to go back and reimplement BLS Pascal the way I would have liked it).
Stepping back a bit, what really made Anders' early designs remarkable wasn't just the engineering, but the deliberate trade-off he made. He emphasized compilation time over almost everything (I think all contemporaries tried to generate as good code as possible). This priority is what dictated a one-pass compiler and in assembler. I saw the same unusual economy in his code where sometimes he would do things in a less efficient way, presumably because it saved code size.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but as best I remember I always lamented the verbosity of Pascal (I worked professionally for a time in Turbo Pascal). Modulo-2 was IMhO a much better language and had he used that, revised with a more concise syntax a-la C/C#/Rust, I think I would have been a lot happier. (I must resist the urge to go back and reimplement BLS Pascal the way I would have liked it).
Stepping back a bit, what really made Anders' early designs remarkable wasn't just the engineering, but the deliberate trade-off he made. He emphasized compilation time over almost everything (I think all contemporaries tried to generate as good code as possible). This priority is what dictated a one-pass compiler and in assembler. I saw the same unusual economy in his code where sometimes he would do things in a less efficient way, presumably because it saved code size.