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FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation

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Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation

#51

Post by AnimalMuppet »

mamcx wrote: post #45
ebbv wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's just perceived uncoolness. I learned Pascal in high school AP CompSci and I've always found it's syntax to be ugly and inelegant. But I learned C first so maybe that's why.

Is interesting that people that "like" the c-like syntax consider pascal "ugly". The opposite is also true.

I've used both professionally. I'd say that "begin" and "end" may be clearer than "{" and "}", but less typing wins when you're writing a lot of code.

Writing "if" statements without short-circuit operators is both tedious and error-prone.

So, yeah, I like the C syntax. It's not a question of "ugly", though. Pascal is tedious. It's more work to write. And, of the kinds of tedious I've complained about here, it's not tedious in a way that gets you more correct code. It's just tedious in a way that takes effort and saps your energy for stuff that doesn't matter.

Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation

#52

Post by int_19h »

ebbv wrote: post #33
baq wrote: post #6

modern pascal is actually pretty good. it's very unfortunate that it isn't considered sexy. i learned programming on turbo pascal and used to think that pascal isn't a serious language. years later, after seeing that it's not dead and dropping prejudices against it i can see that it lost pretty much only because of its perceived uncoolness.

I don't think it's just perceived uncoolness. I learned Pascal in high school AP CompSci and I've always found it's syntax to be ugly and inelegant. But I learned C first so maybe that's why.

Pascal is unnecessary verbose, even in its own family. Even Modula-2, where the most prominent change that is immediately visible is that you don't have to say "begin" so many times, is noticeably better.

It's really too bad about Modula-2. It was a very nice language, comparatively speaking, and it should have been what Pascal eventually became through its dialects (notably Apple's and Borland's).

Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation

#53

Post by int_19h »

_qbjt wrote: post #4

I wonder how prevalent Pascal is in 2016. I've been meaning to write some on a classic Mac OS system I have laying around (just for shits and giggles).

Delphi was very common for LOB applications in some European and ex-USSR countries in 90s and early 00s (more so than VB, which, I think, filled the same niche in US). Plenty of those are still running in production. So, while I doubt there's a lot of new code being written in it, there should be quite a few jobs maintaining and extending an existing codebase.

Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation

#54

Post by eggy »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #51
mamcx wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is interesting that people that "like" the c-like syntax consider pascal "ugly". The opposite is also true.

I've used both professionally. I'd say that "begin" and "end" may be clearer than "{" and "}", but less typing wins when you're writing a lot of code. Writing "if" statements without short-circuit operators is both tedious and error-prone. So, yeah, I like the C syntax. It's not a question of "ugly", though. Pascal is tedious. It's more work to write. And, of the kinds of tedious I've complained about here, it's not…

Ruby seems to be quoted as an elegant language, and it certainly has its followers, and the number of Ends (vs. Begins in Pascal) are just as numerous, yet this is never cited.

Syntax is definitely a personal preference. I know multiple PLs from different families, and even then, I still prefer a certain syntax.

Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation

#57

Post by JDuntemann »

I loved Pascal instantly because my first language was mainframe APL, followed by some weird in-house macroassembler that Xerox was using on its 8080-based business boxes. Compared to APL, Pascal is not only elegant but transcendent. Verbosity bothers me not at all (I used to write COBOL too) because I like being able to read and understand what I've written six months after I set it aside. You couldn't do that with APL, and I had a lot of trouble doing it with C.

As a few other people here mentioned, I'm creating a FreePascal edition of my ancient Turbo Pascal book, ripping out stuff that nobody needs anymore, like CGA graphics and TurboVision. (I believe that there's a Turbo Vision clone available for FreePascal, but I just can't force myself to learn it again and write about it, even though I was writing paying apps with it in 1993.) The book is free, and the current version (I tinker with it irregularly) can be found here:

http://www.copperwood.com/pub/FreePascalSquareOne--08-06-201...

I'm going to stop building the release date into the filename with the next release; just search for "FreePascal SquareOne.pdf".

I'm programming almost exclusively in Lazarus these days, a lot of it for the Raspberry Pi. At some point I'd like to write a couple of shortish books on specific Lazarus topics like databases, and once we get settled in Phoenix I'll give it a try.

BTW, my friend erbo told me about this thread, so I figured I'd stop in and say hi.

--73--

Jeff Duntemann K7JPD

Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation

#58

Post by clouddrover »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #51
mamcx wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is interesting that people that "like" the c-like syntax consider pascal "ugly". The opposite is also true.

I've used both professionally. I'd say that "begin" and "end" may be clearer than "{" and "}", but less typing wins when you're writing a lot of code. Writing "if" statements without short-circuit operators is both tedious and error-prone. So, yeah, I like the C syntax. It's not a question of "ugly", though. Pascal is tedious. It's more work to write. And, of the kinds of tedious I've complained about here, it's not…

> Writing "if" statements without short-circuit operators is both tedious and error-prone.

By default both Delphi and Free Pascal perform short-circuit evaluation of boolean operators. The Delphi and Free Pascal documentation has more:

http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Berlin/en/Boolean_s...

http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Berlin/en/Expressio...

http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/current/ref/refsu48.html...

Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation

#59

Post by PeCaN »

eli wrote: post #48
trentmb wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or that you have to drop $1,405.00 [0] to get a 'professional' environment. [0] https://www.embarcadero.com/app-development-tools-store/delp...

Nonsense. I'd gladly pay $1400 for a development environment if it made my job as a developer easier or better. My recollection is that Delphi (and its various owners) lost their way, not that people suddenly rejected Delphi's price point.

As someone who works with Delphi and C++Builder for a job… yeah, it's the single shittiest development environment ever conceived by man, and they charge exorbitant prices for it.

It's actually gotten so bad that my company is opting to migrate to C# for future development, in spite of our long investment in Delphi.

Re: FreePascal and Lazarus Foundation

#60

Post by Clubber »

This is from my personal experience, YMMV.

Programs written in Turbo C ran faster than programs written in Turbo Pascal, that's why it lost in the MSDOS world.

As an example, WWIV was a very popular BBS in the 80s and early 90s that included source code, so it was popular with a large group of hobbyists. It was originally written in Turbo Pascal but when converted to Turbo C and ran noticeably faster. Other BBSes (Telegard) took WWIV code (allegedly) written in Pascal for their software and they ran slower than the Turbo C version of WWIV. We're talking about 286 4/10Mhz machines with a turbo button, so the difference was noticable. The idea that Turbo C was faster than Turbo Pascal is probably why Pascal lost the MSDOS wars.

Visual Basic was marketed better than Delphi, that's why it lost the Windows wars. Delphi was way ahead of it's time. The VCL (the Delphi library) was robust and modern for the TCP/IP stack. There were components for everything. They released a Linux version called Kylix started in the late 90s. Delphi had many features and compiled to machine code, so it was technically superior to VB. It was much faster to develop with than Visual C++ also. Borland got some executives that made some poor branding decisions, like renaming the company to Inprise (??) then naming it back. Once C# gained traction, Delphi slid into obscurity and was purchased by Embarcado. It mainly exists as a tax on companies who haven't migrated to a more common language.

I learned Turbo Pascal and Turbo C in middle school by tinkering with BBS code. I was taught CS in High School using Turbo Pascal and again in college. It was a great little language that runs very fast machine code, and served me well. It is very capable for production environments, but I prefer C syntax now a days though. If Pascal prompts a return from web to native, I'd embrace it. Web is significantly more tedious than the RAD tools for native applications it replaced for front end development.

Interesting aside, Object Pascal conventions state you should prefix class names with a T (for Type I think). So if are rummaging through an API and you see a lot of types that start with T, you know it was written in a Pascal.

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