Forum Overview :: Rants :: Re: Pascal/Delphi

[quote name="Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS)"][quote name="Oom Shnibble"]Please don't say that Pascal is like Basic. [/quote]I've used both. Pascal and Basic both go back to Algol-60. You can tell the roots of a language by what its loop index construct is. (A loop index is a language keyword that is used to initialize a variable used in a loop which varies the value of the variable on each pass through that block of code.) Fortran is by itself with DO as is Cobol with PERFORM VARYING. But Basic, C, Pascal, and derivatives of them all use the same construct: FOR. I group Pascal and Basic together as "accessible" languages. They were both designed as teaching tools, they are easily usable even by unskilled people (an example of a program in Basic was once printed in TV Guide, no less!) and they're much less complicated than C and the horrible mess of C++. [quote name="Oom Shnibble"]Pascal is looking a bit dated [/quote] The original Standard Pascal is dated, and frankly, is unusable as a serious programming language in the way that a horse-drawn Conestoga wagon today is unusable as a serious form of transportation for a family, although they (both Standard Pascal and Conestoga wagons) were good and usable developments at the time they were invented. Object Pascal, either with the commercial Delphi or with the open-source Free Pascal, which even has its own forms system so you can write an application with forms (windows) and run it on Microsoft Windows or X Windows, is currently usable for writing serious real-world problem solving applications which would be used now. For anything except perhaps system programming I'll put Object Pascal up against C or C++ any day of the week. If Pascal had the support added to handle hardware access as well as C is used for that purpose I'd put it against that, too. In fact, with the ability to inline assembly code I'd say that Pascal is as usable for anything done by C or C++ and with a lot less work and a lot more safety built in. [quote name="Oom Shnibble"]but back in the day [Pascal] was a great language. It abstracted away a lot of the more fiddly pointer based techniques from C/C++ but still allowed you access to them if you wanted it. The language was neat, well structured and was condusive to easy to follow code which is why for a long time it was the defacto language for teaching programming. Delphi which was based on object Pascal was a great application development language and IDE which was way ahead of its time. Unfortunately the combination of shitty management at Borland and ruthless business practices at Microsoft killed it.[/quote] I don't think Pascal was "killed" as much as the web came along and it wasn't there, with the scripting languages either using C or C derivatives - PHP and Perl are very close, and they're both derivatives of C - and so, the lack of support for Pascal as a web application development tool made it irrelevant for a lot of people.[/quote]