10 ms·

Free Pascal Compiler Version 3.0.0

164 points by joubert 11y ago

boothead 11y ago
The amount of time's I've said "No, that's Haskell with an H!". First world problems I guess :-)
moonshinefe 11y ago
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.
- PvsNP_ZA 11y ago
  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.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    I remember there used to exist a South African magazine about game development in Turbo/Free Pascal and Delphi. It is quite nice that those universities still teach it, as that way at least those students will learn that C and C++ aren't the only way of doing systems programming.
  - lordfoom 11y ago
    Point of fact: the RSA department of education removed Java as the language being taught, and replaced it with Delphi, despite objections (from some like myself). Here's an article: http://mybroadband.co.za/news/columns/89295-is-delphi-better-than-java-for-high-school.html http://mybroadband.co.za/news/columns/89295-is-delphi-better...
    - baq 11y ago
      i'd say it's a good decision for everybody except perhaps hiring companies, and then i'm not sure about that either in the long run.
      - nickpsecurity 11y ago
        I agree. When learning to program, one should first learn the mental activity oc solving problems with code. Then maybe learn all the boilerplate and BS associated with a language like Java. Pascal is simple enough that students can learn fundamentals first. Same with industrial BASIC. Both are like pseudocode. Many people are turned off to programming encountering Java, C++, etc because they think programming is inherently that difficult.
- ziotom78 11y ago
  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-fpc.html http://ziotom78.blogspot.fr/2015/01/lfi-data-analysis-with-f...).
  - vrruiz 11y ago
    Nice to read this. I also created a fpc wrapper for cfitsio, but never published it as I thought it would have a limited interest.
  - TimJYoung 11y ago
    Great blog post. One point, though: the reason that you got a segfault with your FillChar on the array isn't because you used a dynamic array instead of static array. Dynamic arrays are just like pointers in terms of how the compiler handles them (the element count is a negative offset from the actual start of the elements, and there are other things like reference counts there also). The reason you got the segfault is because FillChar operates directly on the passed variable. In other words, your FillChar zeroed out the first 4 bytes of the pointer (not good) and then kept right on zeroing out memory that didn't belong to it (definitely not good). The reason the: array[0] notation worked is because subscript references are equivalent to referencing the first element in the array like a variable. Therefore the FillChar started from there and properly filled the rest of the array.
    - ziotom78 11y ago
      Many thanks for this clarification! I have added a link to your explanation at the end of my post.
- andreiv 11y ago
  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...
  - clouddrover 11y ago
    If it's better built then why hasn't had the same success? What are your metrics for "better"? What does "more modern" mean exactly? I don't see that there's much value in pursuing design or implementation purity if the software isn't getting the same end user take-up.
    - andreiv 11y ago
      The Delphi app has been continuously "enriched" with features and special cases, based on direct feature requests for each client that requested one. This has lead to the case where there are several thousands switches which need to work together, in every combination possible. They don't always work, by the way. The new app has selected the more relevant use cases and could be better structured and implemented. Modern means primarily a cleaned up UI, but also the dynamic way of customizing the GUI (defined per JSON and capable of on the fly changes for individual users or groups of users, instead of hard-code and compiled or yet another flag stored in the DB). The clients are usually pleased with the web app but the project managers are a bit hesitant, due to the different installation process. The Delphi app has been sold/installed for well over 10-15 years and people are used to copying .exe files on a server. Copying files and .dll-s and tinkering with IIS seams to be less appealing... The need to go "online" has been the driving factor for the web app.
      - clouddrover 11y ago
        It smells like the web app still has that new car smell. I'd guess that the web app will go through the same process of enrichment. The web app will get the special cases and direct feature requests and will eventually arrive at a similar state as the old application for similar reasons, just in a different implementation.
- moonshinefe 11y ago
  Some good replies to my question here, thanks.
- pilif 11y ago
  In the rare occasions where I still have to do something for Windows, I'm still using my old and trusty version of Delphi 2010. If I had to say anything about Pascal, I would say that it's very readable. Even with multi-years gaps between me having to work on this, it's very easy to re-familiarise myself with the code and it's very easy to understand what it's doing. This might be related to style and, as Delphi was my first real language I've learned waybackwhen in the mid-90ies, yes, I have made a mess with my Pascal too, but it feels like it's much harder to produce a mess than it is in any other language I've worked with so far. Of course this is all just a matter of taste - just giving my 5 cents.
- interfixus 11y ago
  "A new compiler" is a bit of a stretch. The Free Pascal project has been around for about 20 years.
  - lmm 11y ago
    A major version bump suggests a compatibility-breaking change, which would surprise me at this stage in the language lifecycle.
- dejv 11y ago
  Sure, there are not much new development, but there is still a lot of people working in it every day. I am one of those people, maintaining and developing big business system. You can find Pascal/Delphi projects everywhere: a lot of scientific instrumentation software has GUI written in Delphi, there are tons of business software, even big amount of machines has UI for their front panels written in this language. I think Delphi/Lazarus is still best software for writing small to medium sized desktop apps available.
- hsivonen 11y ago
  The HTML spec migrated from a Python-based cross-reference generator (https://bitbucket.org/ms2ger/anolis/ https://bitbucket.org/ms2ger/anolis/) to a Pascal-based one (https://github.com/whatwg/wattsi https://github.com/whatwg/wattsi) recently.
- TimJYoung 11y ago
  We've been in the Delphi/FP/Lazarus 3rd party tools market for 17 years, and are still going strong. Yes, it's become less-used over the years, but it doesn't have anything to do with the language not being up-to-date. It more has been due to issues with Delphi's parent company and pricing. We wrote 2 database engines and a web development IDE using Delphi (compiles Object Pascal to JS). You can use it for just about anything: low-level, high-level, servers, games, LOB applications, mobile, and you can't beat it for code structure. It's highly readable and maintainable, and the compilers/libraries/runtimes are very backwards-compatible, so you can be assured that your coding investment will continue to produce returns for many years. You'd be surprised how many LOB applications are out there that are written in Object Pascal.
- michaelbunny 11y ago
  Yes. Pascal is used. That's definitely the case. In the end there are 3 tribes. freepascal, Delphi and the Elements Compiler (C#, Swift, Oxygene Language is Pascal). There are many more traditional Pascal environments too. Smartmobile (HTML 5 apps), XEROCODER (based on FPC) for Grid developments and an integration into Visual Studio Code ... FPC Version 3 is a huge step and a great one. While I personally admire all of the people's work I must confess the evolution of freepascal as well as the Lazarus IDE is exceptional.
visarga 11y ago
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.
- xentronium 11y ago
  What are you talking about, freepascal has all these things.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  Delphi and FreePascal have all of those.
- e12e 11y ago
  > dynamic size vectors Do you mean run-time sized arrays? http://wiki.freepascal.org/Dynamic_array 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 https://github.com/BeRo1985/flre or: http://regexpstudio.com/TRegExpr/Help/About.html http://regexpstudio.com/TRegExpr/Help/About.html Might work? > hash tables http://wiki.freepascal.org/Data_Structures,_Containers,_Collections http://wiki.freepascal.org/Data_Structures,_Containers,_Coll... ?
antranigv 11y ago
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 :))
- pjmlp 11y ago
  If you want to dive into the world of Oberon you should check the PDFs available at Niklaus Wirth web site and AOS. http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/books.html http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/books.html http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/Front http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/Front You can also have a look how the OS used at ETHZ were like: http://progtools.org/article.php?name=oberon&section=compilers&type=tutorial http://progtools.org/article.php?name=oberon&section=compile... We already had it quite good on the PC with Turbo Pascal and later Delphi, which is why I find a bit sad that it took us almost 20 years to get .NET Native, instead of it being the default toolchain from day one.
  - iheartmemcache 11y ago
    To be fair, most of the benchmarks I've seen from end-users don't have .NET Native outperforming the CLR except in huge number crunching situations[1,2]. As one would imagine in those scenarios using your standard stack of C++ with the GNU GSL[3] (which includes your BLAS, GMP, PDE, and standard lin. alg. stuff) is still pretty much king with MPL (based on MPI) with some (often modest, sometimes incredible OpenCL gains). In numerical methods, Fortran w/ a modern Intel MKL and MPI still reign for SIMD. I guess what I'm saying is, for your day to day Rapid App Dev (which Borland Delphi + the VCL was absolutely king at up until MS put out Lightswitch) you weren't really crunching away. Likewise, especially with modern JIT'ing if you _do_ crunch with a language that hit's the CLR hard, you still get performance similar to .NET Native (contrary to MS claims of "performance similar to C++). I've been a MS advocate for ages and admire what they've been doing since ~2005 at MSR all the way to the production cash cows[MS SQL Standard gives you a ~LOT~ of bang for your buck with SSDT/SSAS/SSRS] (check my 8 year post history - when everyone was rails rails! iOS! MBP!! I was silently C#3'ing along); I say all this as a long preface to pose this question - what exactly did .NET Native bring that presumably made it catch up to TP/Delphi? [1] http://code4k.blogspot.com/2014/06/micro-benchmarking-net-native-and-ryujit.html http://code4k.blogspot.com/2014/06/micro-benchmarking-net-na... [2] https://dzone.com/articles/net-native-performance-and https://dzone.com/articles/net-native-performance-and [3] http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/ http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/
anta40 11y ago
Glad to hear FPC is still well alive and kicking. BTW, AFAIK Wirth's work is not limited to Pascal (there are Oberon and Modula, for example). Wonder why those languages don't gain as much exposure as Pascal does?
- mhd 11y ago
  It's not like Pascal has an insane amount of exposure, I fail to remember any news here that wasn't about a new FPC/Lazarus release. Whereas the Oberon/Modula compiler space seems pretty defunct. And sadly, the same is true for Modula-3, the language that could've been a better Java/C#... The only other language from the family that one reads about here (very) occasionally is Ada. Unless one counts Go as some kind of Algol68-Ratfor.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  Wirth has never been good at marketing. He wrote an article about the state of software engineering. Basically his expectation was that people cared about quality and safety and thus they would appreciate those languages. However since the majority just hack something together without regard for quality, only a few cared to jump into his vision.
Yuioup 11y ago
I think it's cool that a Pascal extension was one of the first to appear for Visual Studio Code: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/Wosi.omnipascal https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/Wosi.omnipascal
Hexcles 11y ago
In China, Pascal is a very popular language for high school beginners of Olympiad in Informatics (see http://www.ioinformatics.org/ http://www.ioinformatics.org/ for the international competition). And it's probably the most used language in the provincial level competition, National Olympiad in Informatics in Province. Yet those who reach the national level will likely switch to C++ for many reasons (STL, performance, etc.). I myself started programming in this way. And even now I'm glad that Pascal was my first language. It's an excellent educational language, which was its original purpose. It doesn't have "absurd" syntax; keywords are long but straightforward; and its type system is static and strong, which I believe is something that a serious programmer has to master. By the way, although probably not as powerful as Delphi (especially in terms of widgets), Lazarus will give you a taste of the Rapid Application Development, which Delphi was famous for.
- gedrap 11y ago
  Same in Lithuania. Everyone who intends to do a degree in computer science is taught Pascal, olympiads are in Pascal/C++. Whether it's a good language to teach highschoolers (students in general, not preparing for olympiads) or not, I am not so sure. On one hand, yeah, it's pretty simple. On other hand, I'd lean towards Python simply because it's more widespread in industry, as a result you have tons of well documented libraries for pretty much everything a highschooler will care about. Therefore, making it much easier to develop something useful, which results in higher motivation. And REPL, ipython notebooks are really neat for learning. But that's the theory. In real life, you have loads of teachers who know only the very basics of Pascal and teaching them a new language might be... challenging (I've witnessed enough teachers struggling with basics of Pascal). So all in all, it seems like Pascal is a reasonable option.
  - tychuz 11y ago
    To be honest they should teach JavaScript instead of Python in highschools. Websites ('web apps'..) are a big deal in, atleast, teenager's life, so they could atleast install Tampermonkey plugin and script some functionality for their favorite websites. Meanwhile after learning python if you won't work in IT is useless. Plus requirement to install Python, include python in PATH and use CMD to launch .py scripts is a detterant, while with Javascript you just press F12 in browser and bam - development environment ready and lets you to manipulate open web page, which is also more exciting than console applications.
kriro 11y ago
Pascal always takes me down memory lane...to the very young me, family just got the first PC. I wrote the first "programs" in good old QBasic but that couldn't create executable files so I bought a random book on Pascal (yellow book, something with 7.0?) I saw in a store which came with a floppy that had a compiler (and thus allowed me to create the magical .exe files). Thinking about this makes me smile for multiple reasons (one of which is that back then for me computers were exclusively Microsoft OS based). The program that I wanted to write? A password protection for the new PC (loaded from autoexec). Highly insecure by design but I was pretty happy to get it working :P The other genius idea from that era was randomly outputting sound (length, frequency etc.). My young self figured that I only had to let the program run for a while until some cool sound effects would be found...well the result was rather unpleasant :D One of the more enlightening moments of my early development as a programmer was looking at assembler output for Pascal vs. C. It never occurred to me before that C-style is just one way of doing it and I had assumed that parameters are always right to left because "that's how it is" :) [must have been around the time when the Phrack with "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" was released as that was when I got interested in assembly]
- welfare 11y ago
  I have almost exactly the same memories of Pascal. Being a kid tinkering with QBasic (and later QuickBasic that also created the mystical executables). It was when I started tinkering with computer graphics I realized that QBasic was not that performant and stumbled upon Pascal. It was in Borland Pascal I first learned about pointers, vectors, memory management etc.
  - meekins 11y ago
    Funny, that's exactly how I moved from Basic to Pascal... And eventually to C since I realized that my awful self-implemented 2d graphics library would never have the performance nor the set of features of for example the Allegro game programming library. I also tinkered a lot in Delphi after that and I'd really like to give Lazarus a try now that I'm an adult who actually knows how to program.
jbb555 11y ago
It's strange, the more new languages I learn, and the more complexity things like C++ acquire, the more I'm starting to feel like we lost something with simple straightforward languages like pascal and even C
- kitd 11y ago
  Welcome to the world of being an "old" programmer.
- DennisP 11y ago
  Go looks pretty simple. I just picked up Kernighan's new book; he says radical simplicity was their main goal, and lists Pascal/Oberon in their influences.
- tormeh 11y ago
  C isn't simple. It has few parts, yes, but it requires you to combine them in ghastly ways. It also has the worst typing I can imagine. Try using calloc, then you can tell me that C is simple.
- fit2rule 11y ago
  I'm with you on this - its why I consider that Lua is the language to learn right now. It provides all the powers of the other languages, and all the performance/advantages of C ..
versteegen 11y ago
I've never used FPC, but my interactions with/what I've heard from a couple of its devs about their engineering decisions consistently leads me to think that they have high standards, so I have a lot of respect for the project!
thiagoharry 11y ago
In Brazil, one of the big universities at the south of the country teaches Pascal as the first language in the Computer Science course. And we use the compiler Free Pascal there. The language is very didactic and still good to beginners. The fact that Pascal isn't widely used is counted as a bonus, because this will force you to learn another language as soon as you get approved in the subject that teaches programming and basic algorithms.
sevensven 11y ago
I've been using Lazarus 2.6 for a free time project since August as I've used Delphi 1.0 in the early nineties and I wanted to see if this was any good. I've been blow away with it, it's Delphi brought from the dead :) It has been a real pleasure to use and I've come to appreciate the productivity that it brings, as this open source IDE is on par with what I remembered from early Delphi versions and, amazingly, I feel this is the cleanest way to target mac and linux GUI apps today (YMMV). It's a shame that there is no support on SWIG for freepascal but it will get there eventually. So, kudos to the freepascal and lazarus teams and thank you very, very much!
- alberte 11y ago
  ...Delphi's not dead - see http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi, now it's cross platform, modern language features - generics, lambdas etc etc. Writing a Mac app in it right now :-)
  - kennydude 11y ago
    "cross platform" to whatever they feel like. I remember in college my teacher bought the new version for that. Turned out "Native Android support" was phonegap which isn't native.
    - TimJYoung 11y ago
      Absolutely false: http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/compiling_android_apps_delphi.html http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/compiling_android_apps_delph...
      - kennydude 11y ago
        College was before 2013 and I haven't looked at it since.
    - PeCaN 11y ago
      It's actually native now, albeit kind of a mess (or at least the C++ version is; I haven't used Delphi). For example, Windows/x86, Windows/x64, and ARM are all different compilers (OS X and ARM are both clang; x64 is an older clang, x86 is totally different) that support different features and have subtly different behavior sometimes. Then there are differences between VCL and Firemonkey, so don't even try porting an existing Win32 app. It's only portable if you try really hard.
barrystaes 11y ago
Good times. I often wondered if there is an OSS project/example that just aims to run the same code on as may platforms as possible.. You know an example? Please share here. :) My followup question would be if they test regressions for all the target platforms manually?
fredmorcos 11y ago
I am currently working on a project that I will be using at home between my laptop and (not so powerful) Raspberry PI. I am well versed in C and this project is written in it, with very minimal dependencies (currently talloc, libbsd and makeheaders). I am trying to keep resource usage at a bare minimum on the server side (Raspberry PI) for obvious reasons. I've never worked with Pascal, and I've been looking for an alternative to C that solves some of the issues I'm having without sacrificing too many of its advantages. Since fpc is available for armv6, I am wondering if someone could give me advice on whether moving this project to Pascal would be beneficial, especially compared to the following points: - A proper module system, without having to keep .h and .c files in sync when the interfaces aren't stable yet. I am currently using makeheaders to make things less annoying for me. - Compiler warnings, cppcheck and scan-build offer me great feedback. Emacs integration of these tools is priceless. - The ability to do things like recv() into the middle of a buffer. That is just too efficient to let go of. I think this is something many people overlook when comparing C to other programming languages, many times you can turn O(2n) into O(n) by taking advantage of this. Not theoretically different, but in practice it can pay off. - Emacs integration and support. Nice to have would be support for auto-completion, static analysis, etc... - Documentation. Man 2, 3 and 3p are priceless. Emacs man integration is great. - Number types that are exactly the same across architectures. eg, I've had issues because off_t was ulong on one machine and ulonglong on the other. - Memory management, error handling and everything you need to do that has nothing to do with the task at hand. It gets old quickly. - Optionally high-level, I am comfortable working with pointers and addressing memory directly, but sometimes I look for elegance where I know performance is not going to be affected too much (ie, the trade-off is acceptable). This also means that when I'm working with higher-level constructs, I'd like to have easy access to the inner workings so that I can make such a judgement myself (either through documentation or other means). - I don't care too much about compilation speed. - Easy semantics and simplicity of things. I really don't think I can put that into words, it's better understood through experience. But this is one of the biggest reasons I stick with C rather than C++ or Rust. - The availability of a widely approved guide that doesn't go into the very basics of programming to explain the language (maybe some sort of Pascal for C people kind of thing). - There are probably a few more points I could talk about but can't think of right now. I could write them down some time later if anyone is interested. Thank you in advance, I would really appreciate if anybody can help me with these points, I'm looking for new adventures :)
kennydude 11y ago
Free Pascal in my limited experience has been ironically better than the commercial Delphi. FPC has the ability to read arrow keys from a CLI, Delphi required some awful lump of Win32 code. Oh and FPC actually generated numbers random enough to make a simple game of Tic Tac To work :') (Delphi did not, making the game unplayable without adding my own version of a random number generator)
samuell 11y ago
The Lazarus IDE and GUI component library is simply fantastic, and the most productive native cross-platform GUI toolkit for the big three desktop OSes (OS X/Windows/Linux) that you'll probably find. We needed small helper tool developed as a cross platform desktop app at the university recently, and had an extremely rewarding experience developing it in Lazarus/FPC: After building the app on Ubuntu, I opened my Windows virtual machine, imported the project, and pressed "Run", and I had a working native windows application, without a single change! (Only on OS/X, there were some missing import of cthreads or something, that needed to be added, amounting to 1LOC). Based on this, today, to anyone developing native cross-platform desktop apps, my number 1 recommendation is Lazarus. Btw, I find the new JVM and Dalvik [1] and Android [2] targets very very interesting! [1] http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_New_Features_3.0#Support_for_the_Java_Virtual_Machine_and_Dalvik_targets http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_New_Features_3.0#Support_for_... [2] http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_New_Features_3.0#Support_for_the_Android_target http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_New_Features_3.0#Support_for_...
StevePerkins 11y ago
Pascal falls into an unfortunate niche: - It's nowhere near new and trendy enough to have a bandwagon (e.g. Node, Go, Rust) - It's not obscure enough to have a retro-cool following (e.g. Tcl, Forth) - It doesn't blaze any theoretical trails in computer science today (e.g. Haskell) - It's not associated with any evil corporate entity, allowing you to praise it "ironically" (e.g. C#) However, I find it to be a really pleasant language to work with, at least for side projects and the occasional cross-platform GUI app. It's a clean, easy-to-learn imperative style throwback... with respectable support for object-orientation (NOTE: Everything in this comment is directed toward Free Pascal's support for Delphi-compatible Object Pascal. I haven't written old school non-OO Pascal since the 1980's). In a nutshell... the language syntax feels like Golang dropped its curly braces, and finally added generics! I believe that the Lazarus IDE and GUI libary for Free Pascal (http://www.lazarus-ide.org http://www.lazarus-ide.org) is by far the most compelling option out there for this common use case: - You want to write a desktop GUI application, supporting OSX, Windows, and Linux from the same codebase. - You strongly prefer static-typed languages. You don't want to cobble together a GTK app with Python or Ruby, and you REALLY don't want to embed three-quarters of Chrome and have to write your app in HTML and JavaScript. - You want AOT compilation down to a standalone executable. You don't want to depend on the target machines having a Java VM or Mono installed. You don't want to wait another several years for Java AOT or .NET Native to become serious reality, and you don't want to deal with the flakiness of Mono's "mkbundle" tool. - Life's too short to install a couple gigabytes worth of Qt, or try to make wxWidgets build properly on a Windows machine, and become proficient with C++. If at least a few of the bullet-points above apply to you, then Free Pascal and Lazarus are definitely worth a look!
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  I recommended it to companies as a future-proof language back in the day because of how easy it was to understand and the better safety than C. I told them that would pay off in maintenance mode plus a compiler or whatever would be easy to write if its support dwindled. Wirth's stuff is just inherently so simple. Most went with C or C++. I hear the codebases are a b to work with. ;)
- samuell 11y ago
nickpsecurity 11y ago
Borland's Delphi (now Embarcadaro) was a platform that made apps faster than C/C++, easier to read, less crashes, less undefined behavior, easy to extend, and so on. The properties of Pascal made it the closest thing to an ideal language for future-proof apps back then. I predicted that, if Borland failed, it would be straight-forward enough to create a replacement stack due to Pascal's focus on simplicity. It was good to see each iteration of Free Pascal do exactly that. Not sure if I'd recommend Pascal today given whats available. It's still one of easiest to pick up and should be effectively future-proof. Way better than ending up with COBOL, C, etc codebases. Maybe those will be its legacy. Another part is Pascal/P showing how to do portability "like a boss." :)
DennisP 11y ago
Seriously old school: > Powerful user friendly Wordstar compatible multi file editor Plus OS/2 Warp and DOS compatibility. I was a huge fan of Turbo Pascal back in the day. Before that it was BASICA and I spent days tracking down bugs by spreading printouts on the floor and tracing my GOTOs. Then Dad brought home Turbo, I tried it out by writing Conway's Life, and it ran without bugs on the first successful compile. Never looked back. Based on some of the other comments here, it might be worth trying out again!
chappi42 11y ago
If only they would embrace modern code managing methods, e.g. Github to make contributing easier. And, maybe, divide the 'pascal universe' in easier digesteable parts: compiler, non-visual core code, core ui components, additional code, Ide. Try to unify documentation, language style etc. Use Markdown (or reStructuredText) with Github documentation projects. Now everything looks so dated. - But I don't complain, great that people still work on Pascal, since decades, and if it works for them, fine. - Anyway, congratulations and thanks :-)
cubano 11y ago
My first foray into "real" PC programming was done in via Kahn/Borland's fairly awesome Turbo Pascal compiler back in the the early 80's for IBM's DOS OS. Pascal introduced me to pointers, free-form editing (I came from interpreted BASIC where line numbers and such forced format) and good CS techniques. I built a true circular linked-list as one of my first projects. I can remember at the time being awed at how fast the compiled executables ran on the PC, and quickly started writing Blackjack and Poker simulations using the language. It's good to see efforts in releasing this...Pascal has been of course outshined by Python, Go etc etc but it's always fun to trip down memory lane.
coldtea 11y ago
For a big, modern, highly successful product written in Pascal (Delphi), see FL Studio. A high performance entry-level DAW, complete with a fully scalable vector based UI. https://www.image-line.com/flstudio/ https://www.image-line.com/flstudio/ They even started porting in to OS X, which was problematic before as they had to wait for Pascal on OS X to get up to par -- it's now in beta stage (available for end-user testing), and should be released sometime around late next year. Details here: https://support.image-line.com/knowledgebase/base.php?ans=114 https://support.image-line.com/knowledgebase/base.php?ans=11... (The in-development OS X version is with fully NATIVE Pascal code, NOT to be confused with their earlier attempt to ship the PC version + WINE libraries).
- Cyph0n 11y ago
  Now that is impressive. I had absolutely no idea Pascal was so powerful!
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Before C caught on fully in the mid-80s, for lots of commercial "powerful" apps, Pascal was a common choice. And in a lesser degree it continued to be, with Delphi et al, until late nineties, although loosing ground fast. It's as low level as C/C++, can inline assembly easily, and offers the same, or even more, functionality out of the box. And back in the day it had excellent compilers too. Actually, in the eighties, Mac OS used to be written in Pascal. And TeX was written in Pascal too, by Knuth. A more modern example of an app would be Skype (Delphi Pascal).
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Was the original development language for Apple's. Portable, too, with P variant ported to 70 architectures or so from 8-bit to mainframes.
lumberjack 11y ago
The crt and graph libraries in Pascal are awesome and I guess the Turbo Pascal compiler as well. In the span of two weeks I went from non even being aware of the concept of "programming" to writing a platformer with only basic understanding of loops, if/switch conditions and procedures. I don't think it gets easier than that as far as imperative programming goes. It's kind of like the scheme of imperative languages.
cJ0th 11y ago
Are there any good resources for someone who already knows how to code to get productive with (Free) Pascal quickly?
- TimJYoung 11y ago
  My recommendation would be to download/install Lazarus, even if you don't want to write a GUI application: http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ You can pop into the IDE and start coding/compiling/running things right away. I haven't seen the FP/Lazarus docs lately, so I can't comment on their quality, but this is a good resource for getting up to speed with Delphi, and a lot of it is exactly the same in FP/Lazarus: http://www.delphibasics.co.uk/index.html http://www.delphibasics.co.uk/index.html
michaelbunny 11y ago
Best news I heard for a long time. 3.0 is almost groundbreaking especially for those designing distributed but lightweight architectures just to mention one advantage among many you get.

164 points by joubert 11y ago

The amount of time's I've said "No, that's Haskell with an H!". First world problems I guess :-)

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.

PvsNP_ZA 11y ago
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.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  I remember there used to exist a South African magazine about game development in Turbo/Free Pascal and Delphi. It is quite nice that those universities still teach it, as that way at least those students will learn that C and C++ aren't the only way of doing systems programming.
- lordfoom 11y ago
  Point of fact: the RSA department of education removed Java as the language being taught, and replaced it with Delphi, despite objections (from some like myself). Here's an article: http://mybroadband.co.za/news/columns/89295-is-delphi-better-than-java-for-high-school.html http://mybroadband.co.za/news/columns/89295-is-delphi-better...
  - baq 11y ago
    i'd say it's a good decision for everybody except perhaps hiring companies, and then i'm not sure about that either in the long run.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      I agree. When learning to program, one should first learn the mental activity oc solving problems with code. Then maybe learn all the boilerplate and BS associated with a language like Java. Pascal is simple enough that students can learn fundamentals first. Same with industrial BASIC. Both are like pseudocode. Many people are turned off to programming encountering Java, C++, etc because they think programming is inherently that difficult.
ziotom78 11y ago
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-fpc.html http://ziotom78.blogspot.fr/2015/01/lfi-data-analysis-with-f...).
- vrruiz 11y ago
  Nice to read this. I also created a fpc wrapper for cfitsio, but never published it as I thought it would have a limited interest.
- TimJYoung 11y ago
  Great blog post. One point, though: the reason that you got a segfault with your FillChar on the array isn't because you used a dynamic array instead of static array. Dynamic arrays are just like pointers in terms of how the compiler handles them (the element count is a negative offset from the actual start of the elements, and there are other things like reference counts there also). The reason you got the segfault is because FillChar operates directly on the passed variable. In other words, your FillChar zeroed out the first 4 bytes of the pointer (not good) and then kept right on zeroing out memory that didn't belong to it (definitely not good). The reason the: array[0] notation worked is because subscript references are equivalent to referencing the first element in the array like a variable. Therefore the FillChar started from there and properly filled the rest of the array.
  - ziotom78 11y ago
    Many thanks for this clarification! I have added a link to your explanation at the end of my post.
andreiv 11y ago
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...
- clouddrover 11y ago
  If it's better built then why hasn't had the same success? What are your metrics for "better"? What does "more modern" mean exactly? I don't see that there's much value in pursuing design or implementation purity if the software isn't getting the same end user take-up.
  - andreiv 11y ago
    The Delphi app has been continuously "enriched" with features and special cases, based on direct feature requests for each client that requested one. This has lead to the case where there are several thousands switches which need to work together, in every combination possible. They don't always work, by the way. The new app has selected the more relevant use cases and could be better structured and implemented. Modern means primarily a cleaned up UI, but also the dynamic way of customizing the GUI (defined per JSON and capable of on the fly changes for individual users or groups of users, instead of hard-code and compiled or yet another flag stored in the DB). The clients are usually pleased with the web app but the project managers are a bit hesitant, due to the different installation process. The Delphi app has been sold/installed for well over 10-15 years and people are used to copying .exe files on a server. Copying files and .dll-s and tinkering with IIS seams to be less appealing... The need to go "online" has been the driving factor for the web app.
    - clouddrover 11y ago
      It smells like the web app still has that new car smell. I'd guess that the web app will go through the same process of enrichment. The web app will get the special cases and direct feature requests and will eventually arrive at a similar state as the old application for similar reasons, just in a different implementation.
moonshinefe 11y ago
Some good replies to my question here, thanks.
pilif 11y ago
In the rare occasions where I still have to do something for Windows, I'm still using my old and trusty version of Delphi 2010. If I had to say anything about Pascal, I would say that it's very readable. Even with multi-years gaps between me having to work on this, it's very easy to re-familiarise myself with the code and it's very easy to understand what it's doing. This might be related to style and, as Delphi was my first real language I've learned waybackwhen in the mid-90ies, yes, I have made a mess with my Pascal too, but it feels like it's much harder to produce a mess than it is in any other language I've worked with so far. Of course this is all just a matter of taste - just giving my 5 cents.
interfixus 11y ago
"A new compiler" is a bit of a stretch. The Free Pascal project has been around for about 20 years.
- lmm 11y ago
  A major version bump suggests a compatibility-breaking change, which would surprise me at this stage in the language lifecycle.
dejv 11y ago
Sure, there are not much new development, but there is still a lot of people working in it every day. I am one of those people, maintaining and developing big business system. You can find Pascal/Delphi projects everywhere: a lot of scientific instrumentation software has GUI written in Delphi, there are tons of business software, even big amount of machines has UI for their front panels written in this language. I think Delphi/Lazarus is still best software for writing small to medium sized desktop apps available.
hsivonen 11y ago
The HTML spec migrated from a Python-based cross-reference generator (https://bitbucket.org/ms2ger/anolis/ https://bitbucket.org/ms2ger/anolis/) to a Pascal-based one (https://github.com/whatwg/wattsi https://github.com/whatwg/wattsi) recently.
TimJYoung 11y ago
We've been in the Delphi/FP/Lazarus 3rd party tools market for 17 years, and are still going strong. Yes, it's become less-used over the years, but it doesn't have anything to do with the language not being up-to-date. It more has been due to issues with Delphi's parent company and pricing. We wrote 2 database engines and a web development IDE using Delphi (compiles Object Pascal to JS). You can use it for just about anything: low-level, high-level, servers, games, LOB applications, mobile, and you can't beat it for code structure. It's highly readable and maintainable, and the compilers/libraries/runtimes are very backwards-compatible, so you can be assured that your coding investment will continue to produce returns for many years. You'd be surprised how many LOB applications are out there that are written in Object Pascal.
michaelbunny 11y ago
Yes. Pascal is used. That's definitely the case. In the end there are 3 tribes. freepascal, Delphi and the Elements Compiler (C#, Swift, Oxygene Language is Pascal). There are many more traditional Pascal environments too. Smartmobile (HTML 5 apps), XEROCODER (based on FPC) for Grid developments and an integration into Visual Studio Code ... FPC Version 3 is a huge step and a great one. While I personally admire all of the people's work I must confess the evolution of freepascal as well as the Lazarus IDE is exceptional.

visarga 11y ago

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.

xentronium 11y ago
What are you talking about, freepascal has all these things.
pjmlp 11y ago
Delphi and FreePascal have all of those.
e12e 11y ago
> dynamic size vectors Do you mean run-time sized arrays? http://wiki.freepascal.org/Dynamic_array 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 https://github.com/BeRo1985/flre or: http://regexpstudio.com/TRegExpr/Help/About.html http://regexpstudio.com/TRegExpr/Help/About.html Might work? > hash tables http://wiki.freepascal.org/Data_Structures,_Containers,_Collections http://wiki.freepascal.org/Data_Structures,_Containers,_Coll... ?

antranigv 11y ago

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 :))

pjmlp 11y ago
If you want to dive into the world of Oberon you should check the PDFs available at Niklaus Wirth web site and AOS. http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/books.html http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/books.html http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/Front http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/Front You can also have a look how the OS used at ETHZ were like: http://progtools.org/article.php?name=oberon&section=compilers&type=tutorial http://progtools.org/article.php?name=oberon&section=compile... We already had it quite good on the PC with Turbo Pascal and later Delphi, which is why I find a bit sad that it took us almost 20 years to get .NET Native, instead of it being the default toolchain from day one.
- iheartmemcache 11y ago
  To be fair, most of the benchmarks I've seen from end-users don't have .NET Native outperforming the CLR except in huge number crunching situations[1,2]. As one would imagine in those scenarios using your standard stack of C++ with the GNU GSL[3] (which includes your BLAS, GMP, PDE, and standard lin. alg. stuff) is still pretty much king with MPL (based on MPI) with some (often modest, sometimes incredible OpenCL gains). In numerical methods, Fortran w/ a modern Intel MKL and MPI still reign for SIMD. I guess what I'm saying is, for your day to day Rapid App Dev (which Borland Delphi + the VCL was absolutely king at up until MS put out Lightswitch) you weren't really crunching away. Likewise, especially with modern JIT'ing if you _do_ crunch with a language that hit's the CLR hard, you still get performance similar to .NET Native (contrary to MS claims of "performance similar to C++). I've been a MS advocate for ages and admire what they've been doing since ~2005 at MSR all the way to the production cash cows[MS SQL Standard gives you a ~LOT~ of bang for your buck with SSDT/SSAS/SSRS] (check my 8 year post history - when everyone was rails rails! iOS! MBP!! I was silently C#3'ing along); I say all this as a long preface to pose this question - what exactly did .NET Native bring that presumably made it catch up to TP/Delphi? [1] http://code4k.blogspot.com/2014/06/micro-benchmarking-net-native-and-ryujit.html http://code4k.blogspot.com/2014/06/micro-benchmarking-net-na... [2] https://dzone.com/articles/net-native-performance-and https://dzone.com/articles/net-native-performance-and [3] http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/ http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/

anta40 11y ago

Glad to hear FPC is still well alive and kicking. BTW, AFAIK Wirth's work is not limited to Pascal (there are Oberon and Modula, for example). Wonder why those languages don't gain as much exposure as Pascal does?

mhd 11y ago
It's not like Pascal has an insane amount of exposure, I fail to remember any news here that wasn't about a new FPC/Lazarus release. Whereas the Oberon/Modula compiler space seems pretty defunct. And sadly, the same is true for Modula-3, the language that could've been a better Java/C#... The only other language from the family that one reads about here (very) occasionally is Ada. Unless one counts Go as some kind of Algol68-Ratfor.
pjmlp 11y ago
Wirth has never been good at marketing. He wrote an article about the state of software engineering. Basically his expectation was that people cared about quality and safety and thus they would appreciate those languages. However since the majority just hack something together without regard for quality, only a few cared to jump into his vision.

Yuioup 11y ago

I think it's cool that a Pascal extension was one of the first to appear for Visual Studio Code: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/Wosi.omnipascal https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/Wosi.omnipascal

Hexcles 11y ago

In China, Pascal is a very popular language for high school beginners of Olympiad in Informatics (see http://www.ioinformatics.org/ http://www.ioinformatics.org/ for the international competition). And it's probably the most used language in the provincial level competition, National Olympiad in Informatics in Province. Yet those who reach the national level will likely switch to C++ for many reasons (STL, performance, etc.). I myself started programming in this way. And even now I'm glad that Pascal was my first language. It's an excellent educational language, which was its original purpose. It doesn't have "absurd" syntax; keywords are long but straightforward; and its type system is static and strong, which I believe is something that a serious programmer has to master. By the way, although probably not as powerful as Delphi (especially in terms of widgets), Lazarus will give you a taste of the Rapid Application Development, which Delphi was famous for.

gedrap 11y ago
Same in Lithuania. Everyone who intends to do a degree in computer science is taught Pascal, olympiads are in Pascal/C++. Whether it's a good language to teach highschoolers (students in general, not preparing for olympiads) or not, I am not so sure. On one hand, yeah, it's pretty simple. On other hand, I'd lean towards Python simply because it's more widespread in industry, as a result you have tons of well documented libraries for pretty much everything a highschooler will care about. Therefore, making it much easier to develop something useful, which results in higher motivation. And REPL, ipython notebooks are really neat for learning. But that's the theory. In real life, you have loads of teachers who know only the very basics of Pascal and teaching them a new language might be... challenging (I've witnessed enough teachers struggling with basics of Pascal). So all in all, it seems like Pascal is a reasonable option.
- tychuz 11y ago
  To be honest they should teach JavaScript instead of Python in highschools. Websites ('web apps'..) are a big deal in, atleast, teenager's life, so they could atleast install Tampermonkey plugin and script some functionality for their favorite websites. Meanwhile after learning python if you won't work in IT is useless. Plus requirement to install Python, include python in PATH and use CMD to launch .py scripts is a detterant, while with Javascript you just press F12 in browser and bam - development environment ready and lets you to manipulate open web page, which is also more exciting than console applications.

kriro 11y ago

Pascal always takes me down memory lane...to the very young me, family just got the first PC. I wrote the first "programs" in good old QBasic but that couldn't create executable files so I bought a random book on Pascal (yellow book, something with 7.0?) I saw in a store which came with a floppy that had a compiler (and thus allowed me to create the magical .exe files). Thinking about this makes me smile for multiple reasons (one of which is that back then for me computers were exclusively Microsoft OS based). The program that I wanted to write? A password protection for the new PC (loaded from autoexec). Highly insecure by design but I was pretty happy to get it working :P The other genius idea from that era was randomly outputting sound (length, frequency etc.). My young self figured that I only had to let the program run for a while until some cool sound effects would be found...well the result was rather unpleasant :D One of the more enlightening moments of my early development as a programmer was looking at assembler output for Pascal vs. C. It never occurred to me before that C-style is just one way of doing it and I had assumed that parameters are always right to left because "that's how it is" :) [must have been around the time when the Phrack with "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" was released as that was when I got interested in assembly]

welfare 11y ago
I have almost exactly the same memories of Pascal. Being a kid tinkering with QBasic (and later QuickBasic that also created the mystical executables). It was when I started tinkering with computer graphics I realized that QBasic was not that performant and stumbled upon Pascal. It was in Borland Pascal I first learned about pointers, vectors, memory management etc.
- meekins 11y ago
  Funny, that's exactly how I moved from Basic to Pascal... And eventually to C since I realized that my awful self-implemented 2d graphics library would never have the performance nor the set of features of for example the Allegro game programming library. I also tinkered a lot in Delphi after that and I'd really like to give Lazarus a try now that I'm an adult who actually knows how to program.

jbb555 11y ago

It's strange, the more new languages I learn, and the more complexity things like C++ acquire, the more I'm starting to feel like we lost something with simple straightforward languages like pascal and even C

kitd 11y ago
Welcome to the world of being an "old" programmer.
DennisP 11y ago
Go looks pretty simple. I just picked up Kernighan's new book; he says radical simplicity was their main goal, and lists Pascal/Oberon in their influences.
tormeh 11y ago
C isn't simple. It has few parts, yes, but it requires you to combine them in ghastly ways. It also has the worst typing I can imagine. Try using calloc, then you can tell me that C is simple.
fit2rule 11y ago
I'm with you on this - its why I consider that Lua is the language to learn right now. It provides all the powers of the other languages, and all the performance/advantages of C ..

versteegen 11y ago

I've never used FPC, but my interactions with/what I've heard from a couple of its devs about their engineering decisions consistently leads me to think that they have high standards, so I have a lot of respect for the project!

thiagoharry 11y ago

In Brazil, one of the big universities at the south of the country teaches Pascal as the first language in the Computer Science course. And we use the compiler Free Pascal there. The language is very didactic and still good to beginners. The fact that Pascal isn't widely used is counted as a bonus, because this will force you to learn another language as soon as you get approved in the subject that teaches programming and basic algorithms.

sevensven 11y ago

I've been using Lazarus 2.6 for a free time project since August as I've used Delphi 1.0 in the early nineties and I wanted to see if this was any good. I've been blow away with it, it's Delphi brought from the dead :) It has been a real pleasure to use and I've come to appreciate the productivity that it brings, as this open source IDE is on par with what I remembered from early Delphi versions and, amazingly, I feel this is the cleanest way to target mac and linux GUI apps today (YMMV). It's a shame that there is no support on SWIG for freepascal but it will get there eventually. So, kudos to the freepascal and lazarus teams and thank you very, very much!

alberte 11y ago
...Delphi's not dead - see http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi, now it's cross platform, modern language features - generics, lambdas etc etc. Writing a Mac app in it right now :-)
- kennydude 11y ago
  "cross platform" to whatever they feel like. I remember in college my teacher bought the new version for that. Turned out "Native Android support" was phonegap which isn't native.
  - TimJYoung 11y ago
    Absolutely false: http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/compiling_android_apps_delphi.html http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/compiling_android_apps_delph...
    - kennydude 11y ago
      College was before 2013 and I haven't looked at it since.
  - PeCaN 11y ago
    It's actually native now, albeit kind of a mess (or at least the C++ version is; I haven't used Delphi). For example, Windows/x86, Windows/x64, and ARM are all different compilers (OS X and ARM are both clang; x64 is an older clang, x86 is totally different) that support different features and have subtly different behavior sometimes. Then there are differences between VCL and Firemonkey, so don't even try porting an existing Win32 app. It's only portable if you try really hard.

barrystaes 11y ago

Good times. I often wondered if there is an OSS project/example that just aims to run the same code on as may platforms as possible.. You know an example? Please share here. :) My followup question would be if they test regressions for all the target platforms manually?

fredmorcos 11y ago

I am currently working on a project that I will be using at home between my laptop and (not so powerful) Raspberry PI. I am well versed in C and this project is written in it, with very minimal dependencies (currently talloc, libbsd and makeheaders). I am trying to keep resource usage at a bare minimum on the server side (Raspberry PI) for obvious reasons. I've never worked with Pascal, and I've been looking for an alternative to C that solves some of the issues I'm having without sacrificing too many of its advantages. Since fpc is available for armv6, I am wondering if someone could give me advice on whether moving this project to Pascal would be beneficial, especially compared to the following points: - A proper module system, without having to keep .h and .c files in sync when the interfaces aren't stable yet. I am currently using makeheaders to make things less annoying for me. - Compiler warnings, cppcheck and scan-build offer me great feedback. Emacs integration of these tools is priceless. - The ability to do things like recv() into the middle of a buffer. That is just too efficient to let go of. I think this is something many people overlook when comparing C to other programming languages, many times you can turn O(2n) into O(n) by taking advantage of this. Not theoretically different, but in practice it can pay off. - Emacs integration and support. Nice to have would be support for auto-completion, static analysis, etc... - Documentation. Man 2, 3 and 3p are priceless. Emacs man integration is great. - Number types that are exactly the same across architectures. eg, I've had issues because off_t was ulong on one machine and ulonglong on the other. - Memory management, error handling and everything you need to do that has nothing to do with the task at hand. It gets old quickly. - Optionally high-level, I am comfortable working with pointers and addressing memory directly, but sometimes I look for elegance where I know performance is not going to be affected too much (ie, the trade-off is acceptable). This also means that when I'm working with higher-level constructs, I'd like to have easy access to the inner workings so that I can make such a judgement myself (either through documentation or other means). - I don't care too much about compilation speed. - Easy semantics and simplicity of things. I really don't think I can put that into words, it's better understood through experience. But this is one of the biggest reasons I stick with C rather than C++ or Rust. - The availability of a widely approved guide that doesn't go into the very basics of programming to explain the language (maybe some sort of Pascal for C people kind of thing). - There are probably a few more points I could talk about but can't think of right now. I could write them down some time later if anyone is interested. Thank you in advance, I would really appreciate if anybody can help me with these points, I'm looking for new adventures :)

kennydude 11y ago

Free Pascal in my limited experience has been ironically better than the commercial Delphi. FPC has the ability to read arrow keys from a CLI, Delphi required some awful lump of Win32 code. Oh and FPC actually generated numbers random enough to make a simple game of Tic Tac To work :') (Delphi did not, making the game unplayable without adding my own version of a random number generator)

samuell 11y ago

The Lazarus IDE and GUI component library is simply fantastic, and the most productive native cross-platform GUI toolkit for the big three desktop OSes (OS X/Windows/Linux) that you'll probably find. We needed small helper tool developed as a cross platform desktop app at the university recently, and had an extremely rewarding experience developing it in Lazarus/FPC: After building the app on Ubuntu, I opened my Windows virtual machine, imported the project, and pressed "Run", and I had a working native windows application, without a single change! (Only on OS/X, there were some missing import of cthreads or something, that needed to be added, amounting to 1LOC). Based on this, today, to anyone developing native cross-platform desktop apps, my number 1 recommendation is Lazarus. Btw, I find the new JVM and Dalvik [1] and Android [2] targets very very interesting! [1] http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_New_Features_3.0#Support_for_the_Java_Virtual_Machine_and_Dalvik_targets http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_New_Features_3.0#Support_for_... [2] http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_New_Features_3.0#Support_for_the_Android_target http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_New_Features_3.0#Support_for_...

StevePerkins 11y ago

Pascal falls into an unfortunate niche: - It's nowhere near new and trendy enough to have a bandwagon (e.g. Node, Go, Rust) - It's not obscure enough to have a retro-cool following (e.g. Tcl, Forth) - It doesn't blaze any theoretical trails in computer science today (e.g. Haskell) - It's not associated with any evil corporate entity, allowing you to praise it "ironically" (e.g. C#) However, I find it to be a really pleasant language to work with, at least for side projects and the occasional cross-platform GUI app. It's a clean, easy-to-learn imperative style throwback... with respectable support for object-orientation (NOTE: Everything in this comment is directed toward Free Pascal's support for Delphi-compatible Object Pascal. I haven't written old school non-OO Pascal since the 1980's). In a nutshell... the language syntax feels like Golang dropped its curly braces, and finally added generics! I believe that the Lazarus IDE and GUI libary for Free Pascal (http://www.lazarus-ide.org http://www.lazarus-ide.org) is by far the most compelling option out there for this common use case: - You want to write a desktop GUI application, supporting OSX, Windows, and Linux from the same codebase. - You strongly prefer static-typed languages. You don't want to cobble together a GTK app with Python or Ruby, and you REALLY don't want to embed three-quarters of Chrome and have to write your app in HTML and JavaScript. - You want AOT compilation down to a standalone executable. You don't want to depend on the target machines having a Java VM or Mono installed. You don't want to wait another several years for Java AOT or .NET Native to become serious reality, and you don't want to deal with the flakiness of Mono's "mkbundle" tool. - Life's too short to install a couple gigabytes worth of Qt, or try to make wxWidgets build properly on a Windows machine, and become proficient with C++. If at least a few of the bullet-points above apply to you, then Free Pascal and Lazarus are definitely worth a look!

nickpsecurity 11y ago
I recommended it to companies as a future-proof language back in the day because of how easy it was to understand and the better safety than C. I told them that would pay off in maintenance mode plus a compiler or whatever would be easy to write if its support dwindled. Wirth's stuff is just inherently so simple. Most went with C or C++. I hear the codebases are a b to work with. ;)
samuell 11y ago

nickpsecurity 11y ago

Borland's Delphi (now Embarcadaro) was a platform that made apps faster than C/C++, easier to read, less crashes, less undefined behavior, easy to extend, and so on. The properties of Pascal made it the closest thing to an ideal language for future-proof apps back then. I predicted that, if Borland failed, it would be straight-forward enough to create a replacement stack due to Pascal's focus on simplicity. It was good to see each iteration of Free Pascal do exactly that. Not sure if I'd recommend Pascal today given whats available. It's still one of easiest to pick up and should be effectively future-proof. Way better than ending up with COBOL, C, etc codebases. Maybe those will be its legacy. Another part is Pascal/P showing how to do portability "like a boss." :)

DennisP 11y ago

Seriously old school: > Powerful user friendly Wordstar compatible multi file editor Plus OS/2 Warp and DOS compatibility. I was a huge fan of Turbo Pascal back in the day. Before that it was BASICA and I spent days tracking down bugs by spreading printouts on the floor and tracing my GOTOs. Then Dad brought home Turbo, I tried it out by writing Conway's Life, and it ran without bugs on the first successful compile. Never looked back. Based on some of the other comments here, it might be worth trying out again!

chappi42 11y ago

If only they would embrace modern code managing methods, e.g. Github to make contributing easier. And, maybe, divide the 'pascal universe' in easier digesteable parts: compiler, non-visual core code, core ui components, additional code, Ide. Try to unify documentation, language style etc. Use Markdown (or reStructuredText) with Github documentation projects. Now everything looks so dated. - But I don't complain, great that people still work on Pascal, since decades, and if it works for them, fine. - Anyway, congratulations and thanks :-)

cubano 11y ago

My first foray into "real" PC programming was done in via Kahn/Borland's fairly awesome Turbo Pascal compiler back in the the early 80's for IBM's DOS OS. Pascal introduced me to pointers, free-form editing (I came from interpreted BASIC where line numbers and such forced format) and good CS techniques. I built a true circular linked-list as one of my first projects. I can remember at the time being awed at how fast the compiled executables ran on the PC, and quickly started writing Blackjack and Poker simulations using the language. It's good to see efforts in releasing this...Pascal has been of course outshined by Python, Go etc etc but it's always fun to trip down memory lane.

coldtea 11y ago

For a big, modern, highly successful product written in Pascal (Delphi), see FL Studio. A high performance entry-level DAW, complete with a fully scalable vector based UI. https://www.image-line.com/flstudio/ https://www.image-line.com/flstudio/ They even started porting in to OS X, which was problematic before as they had to wait for Pascal on OS X to get up to par -- it's now in beta stage (available for end-user testing), and should be released sometime around late next year. Details here: https://support.image-line.com/knowledgebase/base.php?ans=114 https://support.image-line.com/knowledgebase/base.php?ans=11... (The in-development OS X version is with fully NATIVE Pascal code, NOT to be confused with their earlier attempt to ship the PC version + WINE libraries).

Cyph0n 11y ago
Now that is impressive. I had absolutely no idea Pascal was so powerful!
- coldtea 11y ago
  Before C caught on fully in the mid-80s, for lots of commercial "powerful" apps, Pascal was a common choice. And in a lesser degree it continued to be, with Delphi et al, until late nineties, although loosing ground fast. It's as low level as C/C++, can inline assembly easily, and offers the same, or even more, functionality out of the box. And back in the day it had excellent compilers too. Actually, in the eighties, Mac OS used to be written in Pascal. And TeX was written in Pascal too, by Knuth. A more modern example of an app would be Skype (Delphi Pascal).
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Was the original development language for Apple's. Portable, too, with P variant ported to 70 architectures or so from 8-bit to mainframes.

lumberjack 11y ago

The crt and graph libraries in Pascal are awesome and I guess the Turbo Pascal compiler as well. In the span of two weeks I went from non even being aware of the concept of "programming" to writing a platformer with only basic understanding of loops, if/switch conditions and procedures. I don't think it gets easier than that as far as imperative programming goes. It's kind of like the scheme of imperative languages.

cJ0th 11y ago

Are there any good resources for someone who already knows how to code to get productive with (Free) Pascal quickly?

TimJYoung 11y ago
My recommendation would be to download/install Lazarus, even if you don't want to write a GUI application: http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ You can pop into the IDE and start coding/compiling/running things right away. I haven't seen the FP/Lazarus docs lately, so I can't comment on their quality, but this is a good resource for getting up to speed with Delphi, and a lot of it is exactly the same in FP/Lazarus: http://www.delphibasics.co.uk/index.html http://www.delphibasics.co.uk/index.html

michaelbunny 11y ago

Best news I heard for a long time. 3.0 is almost groundbreaking especially for those designing distributed but lightweight architectures just to mention one advantage among many you get.