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Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

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Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

#31

Post by mikewarot »

anta40 wrote: post #19

>> And... Pascal is still in the race for sure! And what about.. umm... Modula 2/3 or Oberon? They don't gain as much industry attractions as Pascal does, eh?

Wirth went too far with Modula, case sensitivity is a bug, not a feature. He became obsessed with purity, instead of usability.

Anders Hejlsberg was the author of the best Pascal implementation, greatly enhancing Pascal until he was seduced by Microsoft and helped start the evil that is .NET and C#.

Delphi was great until Borland decided to abandon most of their user base and pursue the corporate market.

Lazarus/Free pascal is really good, except for the abysmal documentation. The very lumpy approach to creating help actively prevents incremental improvements. There's no way to just fix one page of the help.

Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

#32

Post by jchw »

broken-kebab wrote: post #27
jchw wrote: post #8

Hmm meh. I have a soft spot for Delphi/Object Pascal but I think the case here is not great. What it looks like at a glance is they wrote a better Pascal program than the Go one it was competing against, rather than just idiomatically port it. A fine approach, but it doesn't tell us that much. Specifically, it doesn't tell us very much about programming languages. Go has plenty of weaknesses versus Pascal, but two co…

I think it's better to avoid time-related adjectives like "archaic" when talking about PLs. For starters it doesn't really mean much in general: in software development fashions come, and go, and then reappear as "new" again. Secondly, Pascal syntax is of the same historical age as that of C, and the ML languages. Would you say that C# (or Haskell) is syntactically archaic?

I'm not convinced: the term archaic implies that something is obsolete or subjectively old-fashioned, not just that it's necessarily old. C# isn't archaic in part because C never stopped being relevant this whole time and because C# syntax has evolved significantly in recent years.

Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

#33

Post by msla »

JAlexoid wrote: post #26
wolfi1 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wirth's disdain for C++ leads sometimes to chuckles in the audience at public lectures("C with 2 plusses")

> C with 2 plusses I read it as "C with two pulses"... Which is how I feel about C++ - unnecessarily complicated.

I don't understand the joke you're making.

How does "pulse" equate to complicated?

Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

#34

Post by sixthDot »

runlaszlorun wrote: post #20

I def have a soft spot for Pascal. And I think Niklaus Wirth deserves more recognition in broader circles for his foundational work with pcode, compilers, Oberon, etc. I learned Pascal like many of us growing up in the early PC era and never could look at BASIC the same way again (or respect Gates for his love of it, lol). I think having such a highly structured language at a young age did wonders. But these days fol…

> But these days folks are mostly used to the C style syntax. And I'm not even arguing that it is a better language than C or others. But the whole industry has gone overall into believing that anything newly 'invented' is good and anything that's been around a while is passé

Problem of the Pascal syntax is that it prevents adoption of certain constructs, which are just not nice. A few examples

- lambda expression: `begin` ... `end`, say goodbye to nice one liners;

- binary assign: FPC has `+=` `-=` but obviously not `mod=`, `and=`, etc;

On top of that there are other things like

- shortened boolean evaluation (e.g `if someInt` => `if someInt != 0` is not possible because `and` is a two headed creature

- locals are still not default initialized

I use to like Pascal (actually Delphi then ObjFPC) much but nowaday I think the only good parts are in certain semantics, e.g no fallback in the `case`...`of` construct, manual memory management BUT ref counted arrays.

I would tend more to like a C like syntax with certain semantics coming from the Pascal world.

Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

#35

Post by kagakuninja »

I have lingering distain for Pascal, unlike other people here...

In 1980 I was a freshman at UCSC, and the professors did not like C. So most classes used UCSD Pascal. While it apparently pioneered some cool ideas, it was not at all ready for industry use. The free function was just a suggestion, it didn't deallocate anything. Arrays were fixed size, and an array of size 80 was a different type than size 255 (and 255 was the maximum).

I remember the compiler class where we built a compiler-compiler using Pascal. It was pretty cool that the professor came up with a design that worked, but also quite dumb as we had to pass around a bunch of 255 char arrays. And also insane that we couldn't use the industrial strength tools like C and yacc available on the VAX / UNIX computers...

But what about Modulo-2? Well one professor would torture the class, making them use various not-C languages. One year it was PLZ (A PL/I based language created by Zilog Corporation). When I took the class, it was Modulo-2, using a compiler developed at CMU I think. It also implemented free() as a suggestion that did nothing, and had other warts. I was not impressed...

I realize that it is unfair complaining about shitty academic implementations, but that's what I lived through.

Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

#36

Post by swatcoder »

“In the race”

What a terrible habit we have of speaking about our tools like they’re in competition with each other!

I don’t think I’ll ever meet a carpenter who talks about their hammer or even their manual crank drill being “still in yhe race”.

Tools have contexts where they might be used. Sometimes one tool will supersede another for all the day’s tasks, but tomorrow’s tasks will be different in unknown ways and whatever distinguishes one tool from another may be just the right thing there.

In programming languages, that might look like somebody setting aside a paradigm for a while because projects and architectures went a certain way, but then reviving that paradigm again when they go some other way.

Pascal has some cool stuff to it. We should be curious about that stuff and keep it in mind as new contexts emerge; but it’s never been in a race and we really don’t do ourselves much good in talking about it that way.

Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

#37

Post by theonething »

msla wrote: post #33
JAlexoid wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> C with 2 plusses I read it as "C with two pulses"... Which is how I feel about C++ - unnecessarily complicated.

I don't understand the joke you're making. How does "pulse" equate to complicated?

same here

Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

#38

Post by zozbot234 »

PumpkinSpice wrote: post #25
runlaszlorun wrote: post #20

I def have a soft spot for Pascal. And I think Niklaus Wirth deserves more recognition in broader circles for his foundational work with pcode, compilers, Oberon, etc. I learned Pascal like many of us growing up in the early PC era and never could look at BASIC the same way again (or respect Gates for his love of it, lol). I think having such a highly structured language at a young age did wonders. But these days fol…

I'm surprised that you draw a sharp distinction between C and Pascal syntax. They have a shared lineage and are really very close to each other. Yeah, curly braces won over "begin" and "end", but that's not a matter of some huge conceptual rift, just convenience. There are numerous languages today, including Haskell and Ocaml, that are far more removed from the Algol lineage than these two. Heck, the differences betw…

Historically, the point of writing 'begin' and 'end' instead of using curly braces was mostly support for non-ASCII character sets where the curly braces are not included. It's why C also has an alternate syntax using and COBOL goes as far as writing out arithmetical operators as English text, such as DIVIDE x INTO y GIVING z.

Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

#39

Post by Simplicitas »

kagakuninja wrote: post #35

I have lingering distain for Pascal, unlike other people here... In 1980 I was a freshman at UCSC, and the professors did not like C. So most classes used UCSD Pascal. While it apparently pioneered some cool ideas, it was not at all ready for industry use. The free function was just a suggestion, it didn't deallocate anything. Arrays were fixed size, and an array of size 80 was a different type than size 255 (and 255…

Is it just me or does hearing "Zilog Corporation" not sound like it's straight out of the movie "Blade Runner"?

Re: Modern Pascal is still in the race (2022)

#40

Post by broken-kebab »

jchw wrote: post #32
broken-kebab wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's better to avoid time-related adjectives like "archaic" when talking about PLs. For starters it doesn't really mean much in general: in software development fashions come, and go, and then reappear as "new" again. Secondly, Pascal syntax is of the same historical age as that of C, and the ML languages. Would you say that C# (or Haskell) is syntactically archaic?

I'm not convinced: the term archaic implies that something is obsolete or subjectively old-fashioned, not just that it's necessarily old. C# isn't archaic in part because C never stopped being relevant this whole time and because C# syntax has evolved significantly in recent years.

It's not something to differentiate between them: neither is obsolete as long as somebody uses it to earn, and Pascal dialects has been evolving as well as C#, while neither deviated significantly from their roots. TypeScript (which is rather new PL) uses Pascal-style for types. Haskell, and Ocaml are niche too, and the syntax is 98% from 70s, but it still feels like a new for someone who sees them for the first time. And let's not even touch what hardcore Pythonistas think about what "old-fashioned" means.

Pascal syntax is non-mainstream nowadays, as well as Lisps, MLs, and lots of others, but neither fits to the word "archaic"

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