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Pascal at Apple

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Re: Pascal at Apple

#101

Post by vram22 »

rpeden wrote: post #75
raphinou wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lazarus looks interesting, but what holds me back is that the language doesn't seem to have evolved. I enjoy functional languages much more these days, and I prefer not to go back to an old language. I would be happy to be proven wrong on this

The language has evolved, but it still falls squarely in the imperative, OO camp. And besides, you mentioned than you'd prefer to stick with more functional languages. It's hard to prove someone's preference wrong. :) I mostly share your preference, but I make an exception for Pascal. There's just something about it that draws me in, even though I've only used it for fun, and not professionally.

Yes, Pascal is a fun language to work in. I've always enjoyed working in it, whether in the form of Turbo Pascal, Delphi or Lazarus (did some commercial work in TP and a bit in Delphi, and Lazarus so far, for fun.) Probably many features (or non-features [1]) of the language contribute to it. This is just one point: the use of sets as built into the languages, is nice and reads naturally for expressing some kinds of relationships and tests (foo in bar, where bar is a set) - e.g. char in vowels, etc.

[1] "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/antoinedes103610...

Re: Pascal at Apple

#102

Post by slantyyz »

walshemj wrote: post #90
flomo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was lucky enough to have a second hand Apple ][ from a "hacker", it had a ][+ rom and was pretty much loaded to the gills with a "z80 softcard" and etc. The slot 3 80-column card also had 16K RAM and was the only full-sized card in the machine. (It also came with full documentation if you wanted to burn a different font into a ROM.) So I had a 64K machine, but slot 0 was empty. Unfortunately I never had docs for Pa…

Back in the day THE Gucci accessory for an Apple ][ was the clear Perspex top cover to show off your collection of expansion cards

I would think the 10MB Sider HD was a bigger deal. A friend of mine used one to run a BBS in Toronto back in the day. Before that, he had a custom setup that had a pair of 8" floppies, which was pretty uncommon for the Apple ][ platform.

Re: Pascal at Apple

#103

Post by vram22 »

cjensen wrote: post #2

I really miss Pascal; it was a great and safe language for beginners. As it was extended with Objects and Modules, it was great for development. But there are good reasons it was surpassed by C. In early Pascal, you got a pointer by allocating memory; you could not get a pointer to an existing variable. You'd be surprised how often that gets in the way when implementing a data structure. Just try to implement the fol…

>Pascal got better. But once you've switched to C, the sheer verbosity of Pascal is bothersome. Instead of "{" and "}" Pascal uses "begin" and "end". It uses "procedure" or "function" to introduce a function.

I love both C and Pascal, and I'm a guy who has done a lot of both of them. Hey, its possible to like more than one language. With that background, I think your above points are minor (IMO of course) and should not be an issue in deciding between the two. One can easily get used to "begin" and "end" instead of braces, or vice versa. Same for the keywords "procedure" and "function". Plus, editor shortcuts in modern editors should be able to handle that, or a keyboard enhancement tool like AutoHotkey, vim's abbr command, or equivalents in other tools.

Better still, use both languages, at different times, as per needs, wants, convenience, etc.

Re: Pascal at Apple

#104

Post by vram22 »

tedajax wrote: post #27
cjensen wrote: post #2

I really miss Pascal; it was a great and safe language for beginners. As it was extended with Objects and Modules, it was great for development. But there are good reasons it was surpassed by C. In early Pascal, you got a pointer by allocating memory; you could not get a pointer to an existing variable. You'd be surprised how often that gets in the way when implementing a data structure. Just try to implement the fol…

Intro to computer science freshman year of high school in 2004 was still using turbo pascal and it was great. Dropping into BGI graphics mode was a great beginner friendly way to draw shapes and make some cool things. It's what got me into game development in earnest. I wish I could get this same setup to teach people with but BGI doesn't work in later versions of Windows.

I wrote a ton of simple graphics programs in Turbo Pascal for fun, many of them related to math equations, generating curves from formulae, etc. Good fun. Still remember functions like HiRes; GotoXy(x, y) and the like :) It was a very productive environment and enabled very high speed of development.

Re: Pascal at Apple

#105

Post by rbehrends »

hota_mazi wrote: post #91
pjmlp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think Sun and MS did a big mistake with their VM approaches instead of following what was common on the 90s. So we had to wait 20 years, failure of Moore's law, cache optimization issues, competition from new languages, for them to come up with .NET Native, CoreRT and the initial AOT on Java 9

Calling VM's a mistake is surprising considering that today, a crushing majority of code (JVM, .net and arguably, LLVM) runs on a VM. In comparison, .net native and Core RT are tiny dots on the radar. Besides, - Pascal UCSD Pascal was a VM (p-code) - A few anti-piracy schemes on the Apple ][ used their own VM to obfuscate their code - ScummVM was extremely popular to create games VM's were a thing in the 90s and they…

> Calling VM's a mistake is surprising considering that today, a crushing majority of code (JVM, .net and arguably, LLVM) runs on a VM.

That was more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than a need. There simply was a shortage of reusable compiler backends in the 90s, so when major companies (Sun, IBM, and Microsoft in particular) decided to devote all their resources to the JVM and the CLR, then those became easy targets for language implementors (and low-hanging fruit, too).

Regardless of what you think of them, their success is probably mostly the result of going where the most resources were being spent.

Re: Pascal at Apple

#106

Post by vram22 »

rpeden wrote: post #31
tedajax wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intro to computer science freshman year of high school in 2004 was still using turbo pascal and it was great. Dropping into BGI graphics mode was a great beginner friendly way to draw shapes and make some cool things. It's what got me into game development in earnest. I wish I could get this same setup to teach people with but BGI doesn't work in later versions of Windows.

I think BGI graphics will still work in DOSBox. I remember having a setup a couple of years ago where I shared a directory between Windows and DOSBox. I'd edit the code in Windows using Sublime Text, and then pop in to DOSBox to build/run it. So although it doesn't quite make BGI graphics based apps run directly on Windows...it's still quick and easy enough to have some fun. I did it specifically to give myself a way…

Turbo Pascal is, or at least until some time ago, was, also available from the Borland/Codegear/Embarcadero (hat tip to often useless or destructive M&A) Museum (along with other historical software from them, like Turbo C and so on). I had downloaded TP and TC from the Museum and tried them out a bit again some time ago, for old times' sake. Worked okay, IIRC, but I may have only used them for CLI work, not for BGI graphics. Worth a try though, for BGI, even on Windows, without installing DOSBox.

Update: Here is the link to the Museum:

http://edn.embarcadero.com/museum/antiquesoftware

Re: Pascal at Apple

#107

Post by vram22 »

sand500 wrote: post #12
cjensen wrote: post #2

I really miss Pascal; it was a great and safe language for beginners. As it was extended with Objects and Modules, it was great for development. But there are good reasons it was surpassed by C. In early Pascal, you got a pointer by allocating memory; you could not get a pointer to an existing variable. You'd be surprised how often that gets in the way when implementing a data structure. Just try to implement the fol…

How does Pascal compare to python for absolute begginers?

Not sure if Wirth designed Pascal to be beginner-friendly, but IMO, it is.

Re: Pascal at Apple

#108

Post by phpnode »

boznz wrote: post #19
cjensen wrote: post #2

I really miss Pascal; it was a great and safe language for beginners. As it was extended with Objects and Modules, it was great for development. But there are good reasons it was surpassed by C. In early Pascal, you got a pointer by allocating memory; you could not get a pointer to an existing variable. You'd be surprised how often that gets in the way when implementing a data structure. Just try to implement the fol…

Turbo Pascal was taught at most UK college in the 80's I think most electronic engineers and CS guys who went to school around then were exposed to it and you would be surprised how many PC/DOS programs in the 80's were written in it.

Not just the 80s, until at least 2000 and probably a lot longer

Re: Pascal at Apple

#109

Post by rcarmo »

vram22 wrote: post #95
rcarmo wrote: post #60

I wrote a fair amount of Pascal in my 680x0 Mac days, both in MPW (the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop) and THINK Pascal. Back then Modula-2 was available on VAXen and "big" machines, but Pascal was almost "portable" across Mac/PC/VAXen and was amazingly fast, so it was pretty fun. I eventually moved to C (also using THINK C - see retrospective link below for a sample of those heady times) and never looked back until…

>(If anyone knows of anything like it for cross-platform desktop apps, let me know, I'd love to try it out) Check out Xojo. HN user SyneRyder sometimes comments about it here, and likens it somewhat to Delphi. Cross-platform too. I'm in early stages of trying it out, so won't comment myself on it. Xojo is a BASIC variant, and IIRC, was called RealBASIC earlier. While I've done some work with BASIC and Visual BASIC in…

I tracked RealBasic for a few years before the rebranding. It's nice, and if I were developing desktop apps professionally I'd probably buy it - but for my kids to try out, it's a little expensive :)

But yeah, it delivers.

Re: Pascal at Apple

#110

Post by rcarmo »

vram22 wrote: post #98
rcarmo wrote: post #60

I wrote a fair amount of Pascal in my 680x0 Mac days, both in MPW (the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop) and THINK Pascal. Back then Modula-2 was available on VAXen and "big" machines, but Pascal was almost "portable" across Mac/PC/VAXen and was amazingly fast, so it was pretty fun. I eventually moved to C (also using THINK C - see retrospective link below for a sample of those heady times) and never looked back until…

>It builds fast, tiny, entirely native apps in less than a second, and is an excellent example of how far Pascal went despite falling off the mainstream wagon. D meets some of your criteria too, at least somewhat small fast, native apps. Build speed is decent (or more) too, and it is designed for that - doesn't have C's repeated overhead of pulling in include files. [1] Haven't tried the GUI toolkits for D though (ye…

Thanks, but I was more interested in drag and drop GUI programming.
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