The Nim language [0] feels very inspired by Pascal while looking like Python. If you're interested in fast, compiled & typed languages, I suggest you also take a look at it. I personally love its readability.
Why I use Object Pascal
131–140 of 235 posts
Re: Why I use Object Pascal
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pascal is definitely a very good language for teaching the basic of procedural/imperative programming. It has several good properties : it teaches you structured data (which helps to understand formalization), is strongly typed (which helps to reduce the uncertainty about the behavior of a program which in turn helps student to understand what they do precisely); you don't have to face pointers (which in my own exper…
But when you need them, pointers are there
Ah maybe I'm a bit orthodox here :-) But you're right. At least in Turbo Pascal, there were pointers and super nice in line assembly language.
Re: Why I use Object Pascal
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've described my experience exactly. Once I got to learn C at university, I felt that I was now using a "grown up's programming language". It took a few years to realise that C's manual memory management and explicit pointer handling was making me much less productive as an application programmer.
It's not like Pascal's memory management and pointer situation was that much better.
They actually are, because Pascal knows the size of its types, while C requires using a mix of sizeof and malloc, which many people still get wrong, specially with arrays.
Re: Why I use Object Pascal
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Delphi 7 was released in August 2002 (at least according to the Wikipedia page), over 15 years ago. It's hard to think of this as relatively recent.
It's 21 years newer than the critical article he mentioned..
But that article was not 21 years newer than the first version of TP that was released in 1983.
Re: Why I use Object Pascal
#135As I get older, I'm strongly swinging into the camp that thinks languages should have strongly restrictive syntax. Object pascal is one of those languages which is both low level enough to cleanly map to efficient code, as well as high level enough not to feel really restrictive. Its a language that is completely misunderstood because far to many people read a couple critical essays, and believed everything they read…
>given code completion in editors as old as emacs.
Good point. Even vi (before vim) had/has the abbr(eviation) command which can be used for things like expanding say bg into begin and so on. Plus, typing time is not the biggest part of programming time, not by a long chalk, though of course improving typing productivity can help some with overall programming productivity. Also, others have said in maybe this thread as well as other places, that Pascal's unambiguous syntax is one reason for the high compilation speed of Pascal compilers - which again aids overall productivity. [Used both Turbo Pascal and C a lot.]
Re: Why I use Object Pascal
#136What caused pascal to lose out to C? Seems like it was a good language that had developer uptake.
Pascal was great when you were coloring within the lines, but C was more flexible. I don't think I was ever able to do image processing in Pascal, and I shudder to think what it would take to do a device driver. Pascal was my primary language from about 1980 to 1990, then I transitioned to C and from there to C++. I missed the whole Delphi train.
Given that I did graphics programming with Turbo Pascal on MS-DOS, I wonder what was missing.
Anything more heavy required anyway Assembly, regardless of the high level language being used, C was no different here.
Re: Why I use Object Pascal
#137A huge chunk of my career has been programming in Turbo Pascal and Borland Pascal for Windows. I miss those days!
Re: Why I use Object Pascal
#138My dad still runs his business on a software I wrote in 1998 in Delphi. I haven't touched it since then but it is the only code I have that still works 19 years later.
Does it runs on modern Windows or is it running on a VM?
It could very well work without VM. Current Windows is binary compatible with old programs.
There are a few reasons that programs stop working and most of them are related to hardcoded directories that got perm. restrictions over the years.
Re: Why I use Object Pascal
#139I 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).…
My High School programming class was taught in Pascal (Turbo Pascal version 3 IIRC). I remember liking it just fine, but when I went to the university I switched to C because everything interesting was written in C. Also, there were no Pascal compilers in the FreeBSD (2.0) ports tree back then. I had a notion that Pascal was a "toy teaching language" too, but for what I was doing that didn't really matter.
You must be 50... and you're still on HN! Are you still an engineer? If so, what stack are you using now?
Re: Why I use Object Pascal
#140How are the available packages? Is there a package management system ala `bundler` or `npm`? This to me is a critical piece of adopting a language, especially a non-mainstream one. Pascal has the benefit of being older but access to clean modern libraries is critical. Pascal looks like an excellent option for building cross-platform desktop apps, given the excellent GUI libraries. But I doubt I'm sold enough on it fo…
This is a pretty critical piece for me as well. I've done some googling and I can't find anything definitive.