31–40 of 103 posts
Oooh, Pascal. This'll tickle the fancy of some old-school demo and game coders. I bet we'll see some unique things emerge from this.
I learned to really program in Delphi, before that it was PHP. Pascal and derivatives still hold a special place in my heart. I never imagined nee development would be done with it!
I have a feeling those pascal developers are getting stuff done super productively.
If you go through the available Delphi/FPC libraries, you will find basically anything. From CAD drawing widgets to frameworks for building SCADA systems. Most are not present on GitHub, and if they are, don't have hundreds of stars.
On the other hand I have an impression that in more popular languages like Rust - which I use for my projects, I admit - most projects fall into "grep for the 1000th time, but this time made right".
And mostly to see if those fond memories of learning to code with Turbo Pascal survived the test of time...
Hah pascal, the first language I learned to script some game named Soldat when I was a kid, fun times
Without doing much progress skill wise :-D
https://castle-engine.io/why_pascal I'm gonna have to put a damper on things, here. Most of the reasons listed are things available in any other modern language (safety, cross-platformness, libraries...) but one of the things cited is readability. I work on Pascal code 8 hours a day, and it is not more readable then conventional C syntax ; I'd argue it's much less. The fact that you need to use entire words to denote…
While I agree that it gets slightly tedious to read daily, I have to say that there is no language other than pascal that lets me come back to the language after 3 years and instantly be able to read it with no problems.
I don't know if any other language where this is possible.
After learning Basic at home, once I went to high school, Pascal was the first "serious" programming language I've learned. But since I discovered C a year or two later, I never looked back to Pascal. C felt more "pro", more flexible and seemed closer to metal. Pascal seemed more appropriate for developing GUI apps, while C seemed able to tackle anything, from the most intricate guts of the operating system, to drive…
Around '96-97 I was playing with writing fire effects in Turbo Pascal, most of the tutorials used the asm with mode 13h, and all I had was Turbo Pascal 5.5, which didn't support the asm keyword. So, I dabbled a bit with it, and then in late 97, I found about C, and when I saw the for loop in C - I never touched Pascal again.
I'll have to try it, if only to honor Wirth. And mostly to see if those fond memories of learning to code with Turbo Pascal survived the test of time...
https://castle-engine.io/why_pascal I'm gonna have to put a damper on things, here. Most of the reasons listed are things available in any other modern language (safety, cross-platformness, libraries...) but one of the things cited is readability. I work on Pascal code 8 hours a day, and it is not more readable then conventional C syntax ; I'd argue it's much less. The fact that you need to use entire words to denote…
Words can be helpful for people who don't like symbols? C is very terse, Pascal verbose. It's like C vs Python. Single-character symbols can be hard to parse for some people in the same way words are for you. A good IDE / code structure will make the structure and code easy to differentiate anyway.
https://castle-engine.io/why_pascal I'm gonna have to put a damper on things, here. Most of the reasons listed are things available in any other modern language (safety, cross-platformness, libraries...) but one of the things cited is readability. I work on Pascal code 8 hours a day, and it is not more readable then conventional C syntax ; I'd argue it's much less. The fact that you need to use entire words to denote…
> The fact that you need to use entire words to denote syntax makes it much harder for your brain to parse things : Instead of immediately seeing "this is code structure" and "this is actual code", you need to actually read the words to make that distinction. It is very counter-productive and a bad design solution, imo. While I agree that it gets slightly tedious to read daily, I have to say that there is no language…
The flip side of that coin is you have to reimplement a lot of things yourself, so any essential complexity that the language doesn't handle for you is pushed on you to re-implement in your codebase.
Python's decent at this too. At least the simple Python people use in small scripts. It's almost pseudocode, as long as no one tries and overengineers it.
I took a look at the code, since I was curious far a large Pascal codebase looked like. I haven’t seen a substantial amount of Pascal code since about 2001. One thing I noticed was the file names, I can’t say I’m a fan of prefixing every single source file with “castle”, it makes it much harder to see what the file is about and makes them all look the same. I can’t comment on the actual code, since I’ve never written…
Meaningless nitpick.