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Not to say these are not valid reasons, or expectations one may have from a language, but - what exactly is Pascal being compared to? I mean, it's 2017.
What caused pascal to lose out to C? Seems like it was a good language that had developer uptake.
I was happy to realize that most of the criticism in that essay no longer applies to relatively recent versions of the language/IDE (Delphi 7 in my case).
One huge advantage if Pascal is that it is very easy to read; the code does not look or feel pretty, but it is so easy to read I could get an idea of what was going on without any prior knowledge of Pascal within a few hours.
Keywords not being case-sensitive felt weird at first, but one gets used to it very quickly.
I feel kind of sheepish to admit that "Why Pascal is not my favorite programming language" had a huge impact on me and caused me to avoid Pascal until I was forced to deal with it because a coworker quit and dropped maintenance of an in-house application in my lap. I was happy to realize that most of the criticism in that essay no longer applies to relatively recent versions of the language/IDE (Delphi 7 in my case).…
Hopefully, it has changed but, when I was learning Pascal many years ago, an entire program had to be contained within a single file. No separate compilation files and no linker. For all but toy programs, this made for some very long files which, given the state of editors then, made maintenance a real problem.
Any Pascal compiler for production code supported some kind of modules/units.
Hopefully, it has changed but, when I was learning Pascal many years ago, an entire program had to be contained within a single file. No separate compilation files and no linker. For all but toy programs, this made for some very long files which, given the state of editors then, made maintenance a real problem.
https://mdhughes.tech/2017/09/02/pascal/
and a couple of followup posts