I've tried it in the early '90s when I was a noob. I couldn't get a simple program to work due to limitations of max 255-byte strings and fixed-length arrays. Google and StackOverflow didn't exist back then, so that was it. I went back to my pile of shareware floppies and found another language.
Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?
31–40 of 168 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?
#32I used Turbo Pascal a lot as a teenager. Then I switched to Java and never looked back. For me the main reason was garbage collection.
String size was limited to 255 (non-Unicode) characters, array size needed to be specified at compile time, everything beyond this required manually allocating and unallocating memory... okay for school projects, but too much work for anything more complicated. The standard library didn'd support some simple functionality I had to write in assembler, such as detecting when a key is pressed and when it is released (how can you write an action game without this?), or using 256 colors (the standard library supported 16 colors at most).
The "smart" marketing move to rename a successful product and company to something obscure also didn't help. Why not call it "Visual Pascal" instead?
Re: Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?
#33Lack of portability: the 'standard' Pascal was very limited and each implementation added its own incompatible extension.
So when a free C compiler was released..
Re: Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?
#34You have to be careful by what you define as "success" and "failure". Many/most languages never really fail, they just become more and more niche. So taking your question to be, why isn't Pascal used as much as some of the other languages from antiquity, like C, sh/bash/ksh/etc, or even Lisp, my opinion is that it was a combination of it being an "old" language and an interpreted language. If you take a look at a tim…
Pascal is generally not an interpreted language. It is a compiled language that is suitable for systems and applications programming.
Re: Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?
#35One of the factors was Microsoft. The rival Borland was big on Pascal with the venerable Turbo Pascal. During the years where the mainstream office business landscape transitioned from DOS to OS/2, no wait, Windows, broadly speaking there where two types of application programmers. Those that used C or C++ and those that didn't. For the later camp MS promoted various flavours of Basic, which also had to do with Offic…
While you do have a point, Microsoft also sold a Pascal compiler for many years so it's not exactly like they were on a crusade against the language:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Pascal
When they tried competing with Turbo Pascal, they initially didn't do it by trying to crush it with QuickBasic or QuickC but by introducing QuickPascal, which was source compatible with Turbo Pascal:
Re: Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?
#36when did pascal stop including the array size as part of the array data type?
Open arrays are a thing since ISO Extend Pascal and Turbo Pascal 7.0 for MS-DOS.
Re: Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?
#37Basically Turbo Pascal overshadowed all other Pascal dialects and then Borland got greedy, decided that Fortune 500 were going to be their main customers in detriment of the small dev shops.
Additionally Anders got fed up with the ongoing culture and finally accepted the invitation of former ex-colleges to join Microsoft.
So J++ was born, then .NET, and most of the folks on Windows just moved from Delphi into C#.
Re: Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?
#38I used Turbo Pascal a lot as a teenager. Then I switched to Java and never looked back. For me the main reason was garbage collection. String size was limited to 255 (non-Unicode) characters, array size needed to be specified at compile time, everything beyond this required manually allocating and unallocating memory... okay for school projects, but too much work for anything more complicated. The standard library di…
"Why not call it "Visual Pascal" instead?" Probably because the lawyers advised them that they'd get sued by MicroSoft.
Re: Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?
#39C was faster. It's that simple. Computers were extremely tiny in those days.
Fast where?
Borland compilers were basically the same, and if one cared about speed, the only way to achieve it was hand written Assembly.
Re: Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?
#40http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html
UNIX propaganda that was already out of date when it was published.