parse [from linguistic terminology] vt.
1. To determine the syntactic structure of a sentence or other
utterance (close to the standard English meaning). "That was the
one I saw you." "I can't parse that." 2. More generally, to
understand or comprehend. "It's very simple; you just kretch the
glims and then aos the zotz." "I can't parse that." 3. Of fish,
to have to remove the bones yourself. "I object to parsing fish",
means "I don't want to get a whole fish, but a sliced one is
okay". A `parsed fish' has been deboned. There is some
controversy over whether `unparsed' should mean `bony', or also
mean `deboned'.
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Pascal n.
An Algol-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the
CDC 6600 around 1967-68 as an instructional tool for elementary
programming. This language, designed primarily to keep students
from shooting themselves in the foot and thus extremely
restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of view, was
later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact, became the
ancestor of a large family of languages including Modula-2 and
Ada (see also bondage-and-discipline
language). The hackish point of view on Pascal was
probably best summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan
way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of K&R fame) entitled "Why Pascal is Not
My Favorite Programming Language", which was turned down by the
technical journals but circulated widely via photocopies. It was
eventually published in "Comparing and Assessing Programming
Languages", edited by Alan Feuer and Narain Gehani
(Prentice-Hall, 1984). Part of his discussion is worth repeating
here, because its criticisms are still apposite to Pascal itself
after ten years of improvement and could also stand as an
indictment of many other bondage-and-discipline languages. At the
end of a summary of the case against Pascal, Kernighan wrote: