Why use Pascal? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why use Pascal?

#111

Post by Lerc » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 9:29 PM UTC

I used to use Delphi/Pascal as my main language. In the last decade or two I have been on a bit of a journey looking for a language that feels right to me. I used Haxe for quite a while but I felt Haxe fell into the trap of 'There's a Macro for that' (Macros can do anything, but ultimately enough macros make everyone programming in their own macro augmented language). JavaScript developed decent improvements (but could still use more) and I do a lot of stuff there now.

A year or three ago I was writing some 8-bit AVR code and I gave FreePascal another go. I found it extremely enjoyable. I got to use the newer features and it felt like a truly modern language. Part of what made it so enjoyable was that because I was coding for a tiny space I was not using most of the standard library and just building custom specific code as I went. This meant I did not have the layers of backwards compatible namespace clutter that FreePascal has accumulated over many years (TList, TFPList, TFPGList, TFPGObjectList etc. My main pain point was that the compiler did not allow constant floating point expressions on a target without an FPU(or emulation). Since these could be done at compile time it would have been nice.

Having worked in other spaces, I do now find the inability to define variables mid function to be restrictive, being able to have sub-function scoping is nice too. Begin End vs { } doesn't really bother me. I think I now prefer case sensitive languages and would rather not have letter prefixes on types. I think this is more due to the advancements in editors than anything. Syntax highlighting and active linting can remove text clutter by moving information into separate domains.

I would probably be quite enthusiastic for a descendant language of FreePascal that had a clean slate approach. A new standard library that used the newest features as first class citizens. Maybe when I retire I'll have a go at it.

Re: Why use Pascal?

#112

Post by Al-Khwarizmi » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 9:31 PM UTC

janoc wrote: post #87

whatyesaid wrote: post #53

Unless 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). Whi…

I was teaching programming with Pascal until three years ago, and I think the pedagogical argument might have made sense in the past, but not in 2023 (or 10 years ago for that matter).

The syntax is rigid in all the wrong places. For example, not being able to declare variables anywhere doesn't really help students, this isn't something that typically leads them to errors.

What does lead to lots of errors? Dereferencing uninitialized pointers or going out of bounds in arrays, for example. And the language and compiler won't help you one bit there. Same opaque segmentation faults as with C, same unpredictable behavior as with C, but with worse tooling for debugging.

Compilation time is not an issue in 2023 - well, maybe it is if you compare with C++, but C++ is about the worst non-joke language I can think of for learning (and it was my first language!). C, Java, Python, etc. are fast enough.

Pascal had its time but I don't think there is much reason to use it now, outside of pure curiosity or wanting to try a historical language.

Re: Why use Pascal?

#113

Post by Rochus » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 9:31 PM UTC

badsectoracula wrote: post #107

Rochus wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I had a look at the CLBG results last time the code generated by FreePascal was even about three to four times slower than C/C++; but the benchmark rules are not particularly well suited for fair comparison (some code is obviously written with inside knowledge of the particular compiler/version and not what you usually see for the given language, and the Pascal code likely includes range and overflow checks whic…

> The LLVM backend is not officially supported by FP It used to be a separate project but these days is part of the main development branch. Though indeed the OS and CPU support is very limited. Also i agree about the micro benchmark comparison, they tend to exaggerate differences. FWIW in my own programs i never found Free Pascal's code generator to be inadequate. I do not remember the exact difference but last year…

I read other comments of people claiming the code generated by the LLVM backend was less than factor 1.5 faster than the one generated by the original backend, which is not worth the effort (and the humongous overhead and additional dependencies) from my point of view; but I'm still trying to find information about the specific optimizations done in the current FP compiler.

Re: Why use Pascal?

#114

Post by baq » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 9:31 PM UTC

deely3 wrote: post #62

baq wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java until recently had less going for it than Delphi 15 years ago except the insanely large ecosystem - which trumps everything else, admittedly. Java the language was misguided in its decision to use libraries instead of language features leading to impressive amounts of boilerplate. Yes, you can do everything you can do in Python, Lisp or Haskell. But, you can also do that in brainf*ck, by definition, so the actua…

> because you end up reimplementing all those language features anyway in a slightly broken way or pull in tons of dependencies that do that for you, in either case with added API surface to learn. I suppose this statement is true for absolutely all programming languages? You have to use libraries in all languages, all libraries is somehow broken because of using unique way to implement functionality, by using any li…

Yes.

Except sometimes you don’t have to use libraries because the language just does the right thing out of the box, e.g. go with channels, selects and goroutines. This is what Python’s ‘there should be only one way to do it’ is really about.

Re: Why use Pascal?

#115

Post by chinabot » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 9:32 PM UTC

whatyesaid wrote: post #53

Unless 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.

recently did a conversion of a Delphi program to Java with some C++ and this is a strange argument to use. pressing F9 at any point in Delphi and having your program run a second later is incredible, that plus catching the vast majority of errors compile time certainly does not slow you down.

Speed wise on this last conversion project with the same first level optimizations GCC is a good 50% faster, the Java parts feel about the same or a bit slower though, Disclaimer I never go to extreme optimization settings on compilers, was bitten several years back and happy to not go cutting edge.

Also Pascal is much less toxic community for noobs I got to the point about ten years back I would rather not ask the question on-line for GCC due to the fact I would be branded stupid for not knowing some obscure linker setting or such like.

end of my career now, happy Pascal was part of it, especially in the early Turbo Pascal DOS days, I doubt I would have carried on at the time if I was forced to use C (I later did and it wasnt that bad but I had to scratch my head at the time how people thought it better)

Re: Why use Pascal?

#116

Post by pmelendez » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 9:34 PM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #98

pmelendez wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but Pascal’s type system was pretty solid To be honest, this is a matter of styles, coming from a dynamic type background I don’t appreciate strongly typed systems as an advantage.

Strongly typed is orthogonal to dynamic and static typing. Python and Common Lisp are both "strongly" typed and dynamically typed. There's no reason to shun strong typing if you also like dynamic typing.

I would be curious to see references that claims that dynamic and static typing are orthogonal with strongly typed systems, as “strongly type” is rather ambiguous and the only reason I used the term was because that was how Pascal was promoted back in the day (or at least how was taught to me)

From Wikipedia: In 1974, Liskov and S. Zilles defined a strongly-typed language as one in which "whenever an object is passed from a calling function to a called function, its type must be compatible with the type declared in the called function."

Note that the definition refers to type declaration, both being optional in Python and Common Lisp, so I wouldn’t use either as an example of strongly type languages.

Re: Why use Pascal?

#117

Post by zabzonk » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 9:37 PM UTC

Lerc wrote: post #111

I used to use Delphi/Pascal as my main language. In the last decade or two I have been on a bit of a journey looking for a language that feels right to me. I used Haxe for quite a while but I felt Haxe fell into the trap of 'There's a Macro for that' (Macros can do anything, but ultimately enough macros make everyone programming in their own macro augmented language). JavaScript developed decent improvements (but cou…

> Begin End vs { } doesn't really bother me.

but they don't really mean the same thing - {} defines a local scope, begin...end doesn't.

Re: Why use Pascal?

#118

Post by Al-Khwarizmi » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 9:37 PM UTC

unnouinceput wrote: post #80

whatyesaid wrote: post #53

Unless 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…

A clear example of why it is a pro is the index of a for loop. Why would it be more maintainable to declare all for loop indexes at the beginning of a function? They are basically bound variables that are only meaningful within their loop, and they are usually not even worth commenting.

Re: Why use Pascal?

#119

Post by weinzierl » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 9:37 PM UTC

musicale wrote: post #103

weinzierl wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add more context: Niklaus Wirth's foresight was to design Pascal's syntax to allow a single-pass compile. But it took more than 15 years until we actually had a blazingly fast single-pass compiler and that is totally Anders Hejlsberg's merit.

Every so often a thread pops up about Turbo Pascal and I'm astonished as to how nice an IDE you could fit onto a 64K CP/M system. (See also comments above/below.)

Oh, it was very very nice. I still miss it today sometimes. Here are a few highlights:

- Pressing F1 gave you reliably context sensitive help and the help content was really well put together.

- The debugger was great and was basically what we now know from Eclipse or IntelliJ and completely not like gdb. It had the same keyboard shortcuts for stepping as IntelliJ still has today.

- Computers in the 90s really did not support more than one display, but there was a weird trick that allowed you to connect one color and one monochrome monitor. Turbo Pascal fully supported that and could display the app on the color display while you saw the debugger on the monochrome one. This was before Windows and GUIs, everything was fullscreen. Without that there was no way to see debugger and app at the same time.

- The editor was so good that I preferred it over a word processor even for writing prose.

Re: Why use Pascal?

#120

Post by Rochus » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 9:39 PM UTC

slt2021 wrote: post #110

Rochus wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pascal uses a single-pass LL(1) No longer the case with the Pascal version used by the game engine.

which Pascal compiler is it - Embarcadero or FPC?

It's the language itself; I currently build a parser for FP 3.2.2 and I need more look-ahead than LL(1) in different parts of the syntax. And it has features which require more than one pass.