Live data from Hacker News

Free Pascal Compiler Version 3.0.0

getlazarus.org

1–10 of 112 posts

Re: Free Pascal Compiler Version 3.0.0

#2
Do people code in Pascal still?! I remember it from years ago in high school and it seemed like it was already ancient then.

Nothing against the language itself, it was straightforward and easy to learn on. Just surprised to see a new compiler for it coming out.

Re: Free Pascal Compiler Version 3.0.0

#4

Do people code in Pascal still?! I remember it from years ago in high school and it seemed like it was already ancient then. Nothing against the language itself, it was straightforward and easy to learn on. Just surprised to see a new compiler for it coming out.

In South Africa, Pascal and Delphi are still taught in schools... In fact, the University of South Africa actually has about 2 Delphi semester modules also, along with C++.

Some schools have switched over to Java, and most other universities have jumped onto the Java/.NET bandwagon.

So in a nutshell, I think it's still pretty prevalent in 3rd world countries. It's not a bad starting language to introduce students to programming concepts, although I would prefer Python for a first language.

Re: Free Pascal Compiler Version 3.0.0

#6

Do people code in Pascal still?! I remember it from years ago in high school and it seemed like it was already ancient then. Nothing against the language itself, it was straightforward and easy to learn on. Just surprised to see a new compiler for it coming out.

I used it a few months ago to develop some HPC code for analyzing the timelines of a cosmological instrument (ESA Planck/LFI), and I was quite happy with the result. I even wrote a blog post about my experience (http://ziotom78.blogspot.fr/2015/01/lfi-data-analysis-with-f...).

Re: Free Pascal Compiler Version 3.0.0

#7

Do people code in Pascal still?! I remember it from years ago in high school and it seemed like it was already ancient then. Nothing against the language itself, it was straightforward and easy to learn on. Just surprised to see a new compiler for it coming out.

The firm where I currently work has a rather huge Delphi legacy software. You'd be surprised how much is still being "extracted" out of if. The more modern (and better built, but I'm biased, as I'm part of the team developing it) web app, which is meant to replace the Delphi one, has not had the same success. It's picking up momentum though...

Re: Free Pascal Compiler Version 3.0.0

#8
For people who are going to ask "Do people still use pascal?", long story short-> yes they do, and Free Pascal Compiler is not only the traditional Pascal that we used to lean in school, it's also an Object Pascal compiler, and has many many libraries for modern programming :)) I started learning programming with Pascal when I was a child, it helped me to understand many things, lately I had a look at Python, which I love it a lot, but when I took a look back at Pascal (Object Pascal this time) I understood that everyone should start programming with Object Pascal and learn about the basics (then use what ever you want, .NET, Java, C++, Ada, etc). BUT I found out about this amazing language Oberon-2, and I should say that in schools we should move not to Python/Java, but to Oberon-2 (it's again a Wirthian language). Sorry for my bad English, just wanted to share my view, and I'd like also to say that (IMHO) making GUI programs using Lazarus is much easier than, well, anything else :))

Re: Free Pascal Compiler Version 3.0.0

#10
post #3

Pattern background. Is this page from 1998? I used to love Pascal, but as it has no decent hash tables, regexes and dynamic size vectors, I can't take it seriously any more.

> dynamic size vectors

Do you mean run-time sized arrays?

http://wiki.freepascal.org/Dynamic_array

> regexes

Seems a bit odd to complain about that missing as a language feature of a pretty low-level language, however:

https://github.com/BeRo1985/flre or: http://regexpstudio.com/TRegExpr/Help/About.html

Might work?

> hash tables

http://wiki.freepascal.org/Data_Structures,_Containers,_Coll... ?

Post reply on HN