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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted 17:13, 1 March 2008.

Pascal (programming language)

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I'm nominating this article for featured article because:

It includes a lot of Wikipedia's Style Guidelines. It has necessary internal links and very useful complete list of external links. It has sufficient list of references. The article contains excellent info about basic principles of Pascal language and about history of Pascal progress. Any image is not necessary for this article. Tim32 (talk) 14:32, 25 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

  • No inline citations!
  • Lead needs to be expanded to form a concise summary of the article. See WP:LEAD
  • A number of the paragraphs are short, making the prose choppy.
  • There is a lot of unreferenced criticism, but was Pascal well-received anywhere?
  • The external links section needs to conform to WP:EL
  • Think about reducing the "see also" section.
  • Further reading section needs to be alphabeticised by author's surname.
  • "List of related standards" section only has one item.
  • "Compilers and interpreters" section has a lot of embedded external links. Think about making the external links footnotes, using the citation templates available.
  • There are a number of other issues, and this is too early for FAC. The nominator has only edited this article once, so I recommend a peer review and copyedit. I don't think this can all be accomplished at FAC, so I also recommend that the nominator removes the candidate until this has been done. This is merely a suggestion.

PeterSymonds | talk 16:52, 25 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose This is definitely not going to pass without some hard work; I agree with the items listed above. Gary King (talk) 17:15, 25 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with some listed items, but I do not think that this article needs citations, that "see also" section has to be reduced and that lead needs to be expanded. Anyhow this discussion will be very useful for the article, so lets wait for other ideas...--Tim32 (talk) 14:26, 26 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]


  • Oppose
    • Per WP:LEAD, the lead should summarize the article
    • History section needs to also list the full name of the designer - people don't necessarily read the infobox or lead (I never read infoboxes)
    • You do need citations for some comments. Here are examples (I didn't finish the article)
      • "and all types of Pascal programs can be used for both education and software development."
      • "Variants of Pascal are still widely used today" (and when is today? will that still be accurate in a few years?)
      • "Pascal was the primary high-level language used for development in the Apple Lisa, and "
      • "Wirth's intention was to create an efficient language (regarding both compilation speed and generated code) based on so-called structured programming"
      • "a concept which had recently become popular."
      • "Other languages that influenced Pascal's development were COBOL, ALGOL 68, Simula 67, and Wirth's own Algol-W ."
      • "Niklaus Wirth reports that a first attempt to implement it in Fortran in 1969 was unsuccessful due to Fortran's inadequacy to express complex data structures"
      • "The GNU Pascal compiler is one notable exception, being written in C."
      • "The first successful port of the CDC Pascal compiler to another mainframe was completed by Welsh and Quinn at the Queen's University of Belfast in 1972. The target was the ICL 1900 computer"
    • Don't use italics in the brief description section. It might be worthwhile to wikilink to some of those words for people unfamiliar with programming (see Wikipedia:Manual of Style (text formatting))
    • Don't use bolding for emphasis either (see Wikipedia:Manual of Style (text formatting))
    • Do not link to external URLS in the body of the article (compilers section)
    • I don't think the article needs to try to contain a complete list of compilers. Maybe list one or two, and split the rest off into List of Pascal compilers
    • There are a lot of very short (one or two sentence) paragraphs that should be combined if possible
    • Trim the See Also list if possible. Generally if the term is wikilinked in the article it should not be in the See Also
    • The External links section needs to be trimmed.

Karanacs (talk) 21:05, 28 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Thanks for calling WP:GVF to my attention; I've deleted that phrase. WP:FACR is the appropriate page, it says "It has images and other media where they are appropriate to the subject, with succinct captions and acceptable copyright status", and a GA page doesn't enter into the equation at WP:FAC. Also, that was recently added, so probably escaped attention til now.[1] SandyGeorgia (Talk) 05:37, 1 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Fair enough; somehow I had a hunch the WP:GVF wouldn't fly. In any case, we have free images of Niklaus Wirth and, better yet Blaise Pascal. That being the case (especially for the namesake), I think the "It has images ... where they are appropriate to the subject" concern stands. ЭLСОВВОLД talk 12:21, 1 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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