We need to bring back Oberon. Fast compile times, automatic memory management, live environment.
Oberon is even older than Delphi; a more modern version is Oberon+: https://oberon-lang.github.io/
Why use Pascal?
81–90 of 516 posts
Re: Why use Pascal?
#82I'm using Free Pascal for my 3D game engine (recent-ish screenshot[0]). For me there is really two main simple reasons: 1. Lazarus. A game engine is -waaay- more than just a 3D engine with the tools being a very important aspect. Lazarus and LCL provide a rich and well featured WYSIWYG RAD IDE and framework for making desktop applications. As a bonus Lazarus as an IDE (even ignoring the LCL framework) is very fast. 2…
What about performance, e.g. compared with C++?
Re: Why use Pascal?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can’t speak about Object Pascal, but the old Pascal was objectively better than C. You can like or dislike the differences in syntax, but Pascal’s type system was pretty solid which can’t be said about C
The way I remember the pascal type system is arrays of different lengths were different types.
In the original Pascal, that was true. The standard (and, I think, Jensen & Wirth) were that way. And it was a fatal flaw.
I had a program that I took over that did a numerical simulation on a 2D grid with user-specified size. The original author simulated that 2D grid with a 1D doubly-linked list. As you might expect, this was both slow and error-prone. But he did it because there was no possible type that you could give to a user-sized array. There was literally no way to talk about such a thing.
We eventually "fixed" it by allocating the largest 2D array possible within our memory limitations, and using only the user-specified part of it.
Most "real" Pascals (Turbo Pascal, but others that were intended to be used in the real world, not just in the classroom) developed some way to give a type to a variable-length array (and also to do a C-ish cast). Unfortunately they all did it in different ways, so there was no code portability between compilers if your code needed such things.
So, yeah, "objectively better than C" is quite a stretch, even just in the type system.
Re: Why use Pascal?
#84I disagree with some of their reasons. Modern: Object Pascal isn't a modern language. It was modern in 1998, maybe, but it hasn't evolved much since then. Latest big change was the addition of generics, behind almost any other language. Fast: FPC doesn't generate particularly fast code, and the nature of OP objects doesn't help with locality. It's faster than scripting languages, but generally slower than AOT compile…
> On the other hand, the ecosystem is great. Hard disagree. I worked with Pascal for about 10 years, and the lack of modern libraries was a source of frequent frustration, meaning we often had to develop the solutions ourselves, or abandon an idea entirely.
May we please have a few examples of what's missing?
Re: Why use Pascal?
#85Question for Castle Engine users:
How is the file size when exporting to web, for an near-empty project?
Re: Why use Pascal?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
The syntax is timeless, because it is much closer to math than B/BCPL/C heritage. It has its own issues but overall it is much better thought out than most other languages. Here is a comment I wrote a couple of months ago with more arguments for Pascal's syntax: "Yes, Rust does indeed and a long time before that it was Pascal. I really love Pascal's syntax, it makes a lot of sense when you approach it with a math bac…
> numeric data types are 'integer' and 'real', no single/double nonsense Actually in Free Pascal (and AFAIK Delphi) there are Single and Double (and Extended) that map to 32bit and 64bit floats (Extended depends on the target CPU, e.g. for 32bit x86 is 80bit floats but for 64bit x86 is 64bit floats) since you actually do need to differentiate between the two in practice. > 'functions' are for returning values, 'proce…
When it comes to real vs float I should not have called the later nonsense. I agree that both have their place depending whether you want to express things at a lower (closer to hardware or wire protocol) level or more abstractly.
It is still sad that languages like C (and even Rust) only offer the lower level types.
What you said about functions and procedures is also true. I still think that it is valuable to have a distinction syntactically, even if they are relatively similar under the hood. Maybe one day we will have a Pascal compiler that can enforce that functions are side-effect free...
Re: Why use Pascal?
#87Unless you want a C++ with a different syntax and less features then there's no reason to learn Pascal in 2023. And the syntax is much worse, you can't even declare variables in the middle of a function it has to go before the function. This slows you down from real work (art code comes later). It also makes worse code as declaring near the usage point makes code more clear.
That's completely missing the point.
While Pascal can be used for serious work, it is first and foremost a teaching language friendly to beginners meant for introducing people (who back in the day) likely started with something like BASIC to concepts of structured and objects oriented programming. The syntax is easy to learn, fairly clean and the language has very fast compilation (C++ really can't compete here). Which is important when teaching - permits rapid iteration.
Concerning archaic/rigid syntax - there are some good reasons why the syntax is like it is. E.g. the concept of declaring a variable in the middle of a block didn't exist in Pascal for a reason - you had to actually allocate memory before you used it, the compiler didn't hide this from you. That's why variables are declared at the start of the block.
When Pascal has been designed it was running on various 8bit and 16bit machines and was originally compiled into bytecode (p-code), so optimizations like statement reordering common today (which permits to declare the variables in the middle of blocks) didn't exist/weren't possible/common.
These days you have a ton of abstractions between you and the "metal" running your code, Pascal is a language designed for much simpler time and hardware.
Re: Why use Pascal?
#88Pascal was one of my first languages and I love it for that, but I can’t imagine going back to it. It never had a modern ecosystem and the OOP stuff was super janky
Re: Why use Pascal?
#89In the future, if you ever create a teaching language, please point out clearly to the students that it's a teaching language.
Re: Why use Pascal?
#90Unless you want a C++ with a different syntax and less features then there's no reason to learn Pascal in 2023. And the syntax is much worse, you can't even declare variables in the middle of a function it has to go before the function. This slows you down from real work (art code comes later). It also makes worse code as declaring near the usage point makes code more clear.
I never understood why is declaring variables in the middle of the code a "pro" for some. In my experience that's a "con" especially because of maintainability. Same way you do a comment before declaring a function to explain its purpose, you do a comment for each variable to declare its goal within said function. That's proper maintainability for a project. Also Delphi, for past 2 years, has this "middle" variable d…
Like dynamic typing and other things, declaring things in the middle of your code block seemed like a great idea to young me, but as I’ve gotten older, things like organizing variable definitions, strict use of types (or the kind of sucky type hints in Python), and other kinds of self-documenting declarations have become much more appealing to me. It might save “real work” from happening if you measure by lines of code, but you pay that price later when debugging or reading code you haven’t touched in a long time.