Why use Pascal?

>> 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.

I use Pascal only for side job/hobby, not for daily work. Lazarus+FPC is still my #1 choice for desktop app (is this still a "thing" in 2023?). No Electron, no JVM etc etc.

For writing web/server/backend stuffs, kinda hard to argue with Go.

Pascal. It’s a typo.

Pascal isn't too bad; actually I think that it has some advantages over some more modern programming languages. It isn't perfect though and does have disadvantages too. I sometimes use for Pascal and BASIC for DOS programming; Pascal does look OK for that, at least (and C seems not as good for DOS programming (at least in real mode), even though it is sometimes done). However, for programming in Linux, I generally prefer C (although I also use PostScript; I think that both C and PostScript have some advantages compared with some more modern programming languages). Pascal can be used for other programs too; even TeX is written in Pascal.

What's your use of Postscript? I find fascinating when people use it for anything other than print related stuff

I think that it is not such a bad programming language. I have used it for both graphical and nongraphical stuff. For example:

- A library to read/write the ZZT file format. I had then also used it to make a program which will draw a graphical map (I also defined a "PCEncoding" vector, although some characters seems to not work somehow). I had also done other things with it that are not graphical, including constructing ZZT world file automatically or making batch modifications to existing world files.

- A library to parse a UHS hint file. Later, a program could also be written to allow it to be printed out, perhaps even using invisible ink or scratch-off layer if you have a suitable printer. It could also be used for interactive mode without printing.

- I wrote a program to convert the levels from a DOS game into the Free Hero Mesh level import format, in PostScript. (A similar thing can be done to convert levels from other games, I suppose.)

- I wanted to measure the computer's temperature and load over time, so I wrote a program in C to write the measurements to a file (just simple binary data with fixed length records) and then wrote PostScript program which will plot it on a graph and make a PNG file.

- I also implemented getopt and JSON and multicodec in PostScript. I don't use JSON much, although I do use the getopt implementation sometimes.

- I wanted to write a Pokemon battle simulator in C. I had used PostScript to manage some of the configuration-related stuff that is used before the program is compiled. As a side-effect, it can also make the type matchup charts in PNG as well (in addition to producing the files in the format used by the battle simulator I wanted to write), so now I have those as a reference even when playing a different game.

- I also implemented Infocom's Z-machine in PostScript, although that is mostly just to see if I can. It implements both interactive mode (without the printer, using standard I/O), and the transcript (with the printer).

Nevertheless, there are some things I would improve in PostScript. For example, add a "unread" operator (similar to ungetc in C), a built-in procedure called "#!" which just skips the rest of the line from the source file (the following slash is a new token in PostScript (which will be skipped by this procedure) so this will work), optional auto-allocation for stuff such as "readline", making warning/diagnostic/error messages on stderr instead of stdout (although "print", "=", "==" would still write to stdout; you can use "write==" etc to write to other files, but being able to do this with "pstack" would also be useful), and some other stuff. (Some of the stuff in Ghostscript is good, such as the ARGUMENTS array; that is probably the feature of Ghostscript which I use most often. %pipe% is also useful.)