8 ms·

Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language (1981)

31 points by dsego 8y ago

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
It's an interesting read and at the same time a relief to realize that many if not most of the problems have been addressed years ago. E.g. sorting an array in FreePascal is a very simple task (not to mention that dynamic arrays and generics are also supported).
- clouddrover 8y ago
  And in the recent versions of Delphi you can use TArray which supports generics and simply call its Sort method: http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Rio/en/System.Generics.Collections.TArray.Sort http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Rio/en/System.Gener... It's a shame more people don't use Object Pascal. I like it a lot.
- nine_k 8y ago
  It's funny that generics are supported in Pascal, but not in its spiritual successor, Go. (Of course, Go's succession goes not directly from Pascal, but through Modula-2 and Oberon.)
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    is the discussion about Generics over in golang-dev ?
  - magicalhippo 8y ago
    Delphi has compile-time generics, which is kind of a "worst of both worlds" approach. It has all the constraints of templates, but none of the benefits of run-time instantiated generics like .Net has. For example you can't make a generic function that uses the + operator to add two parameterized elements together, because there's no way to constrain the types to only those which has the + operator defined. But unlike templates in C++, the compiler doesn't just try and see if it works but rather emits an error.
clouddrover 8y ago
This article pops up every now and again. Most of the criticisms are no longer valid. Pascal has moved on in the last 38 years. If you don't know modern Pascal then check out Free Pascal, Lazarus, and Delphi: https://www.freepascal.org/ https://www.freepascal.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi (And Delphi documentation at http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/ http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/ )
- acqq 8y ago
  Specifically, just two years after the title text was written, in 1983, there was already Turbo Pascal which was much more useful than the language as defined for the introductory university classes: http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/20693 http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/20693 It was the fastest compiler and environment of the time, but additionally, even before 1983, the "minimal" form of the language, suitable for teaching, was almost never used in production. What was used in production did have the necessary extensions which allowed having some very good software, with provably less bugs than C, because the basis was good and safer. See also MacPaint, developed also around 1983 ("finished in October 1983"), in Apple Pascal: https://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw-source-code/ https://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw... Even Go language took its influences from Pascal, "rediscovering" some aspects that were obviously better (for the humans writing programs) than C.
  - ptrott2017 8y ago
    I think Go was more influenced by Pascal's descendent's notably Oberon-2 (Pascal ->Modula 2/3 ->Oberon) thanks to Robert Griesemer, but definitely an indirect but significant influence.
  - rob74 8y ago
    Actually the influence of the Pascal family and that of the C family are about equally significant, if you go by the chart from the "Go Programming Language" book (available in the free preview, page xiii https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Addison-Wesley-Professional-Computing/dp/0134190440/ https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Addison-Wesley-P...). Most significant is probably the module system, which, in good Turbo Pascal tradition, allows Go to run loops around other C-family languages (looking at you Rust ;) ), and of course the declaration syntax ("i int" instead of "int i"). Since I first came across Go I've been thinking that a Go-based Delphi clone would be really amazing. Maybe someone could breathe some new life into the Lazarus IDE by adding support for Go? Hmmm, actually there already is something: https://github.com/ying32/govcl https://github.com/ying32/govcl - probably worth keeping an eye on...
analognoise 8y ago
My usual shoutout to Lazarus/FreePascal go here: They're really wonderful, modern, well-maintained and ready for professional work. If you've experienced 100MB Electron garbage and are tired of it, or you think C++ is a tangled mess and want no part in it, and you need something LGPL that has a wonderful community, check it out.
sysrpl 8y ago
If anyone cares for an overview of Lazarus and Free Pascal, here are a few resources: https://www.getlazarus.org/new/ https://www.getlazarus.org/new/ https://www.getlazarus.org/learn/language/lexical/ https://www.getlazarus.org/learn/language/lexical/ ... and the searchable online reference: http://docs.getlazarus.org/#rtl+system+tobject# http://docs.getlazarus.org/#rtl+system+tobject#
romwell 8y ago
Good thing that we aren't using languages the way they were in 1981 anymore. As for Pascal, TurboPascal has been revolutionary, and it came out in 1983, two years after this article came out. TP, the lightning-speed IDE, debugger and compiler in one small executable pushed Pascal to its peak popularity; Delphi was another revolution. These days, Lazarus would be the go-to modern Pascal successor. (Delphi is still here, but is very much non-free; Lazarus is FOSS).
- tokyodude 8y ago
  Someone told me TurboPascal was actually Modula-2 just named "Pascal" for marketing. Where they wrong?
  - mannschott 8y ago
    Yes. Most obviously Modula-2 is is case-sensitive, while (Turbo)Pascal is not. Also Modula-2 addresses the danging-else problem in Pascal, while TurboPascal does not. It wouldn't surprise me if TurboPascal addressed some of the same deficiencies in Pascal that Wirth also addressed in Modula-2, but they probably do so differently.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    No, it was definitely Pascal. There's certainly quite a lot of stylistic crossover between the two languages but they are distinct.
jonathanstrange 8y ago
I used to be a language snob until I realized that the choice of language is pretty much irrelevant. What counts is the tooling, the available libraries and framework, and sometimes also how fast the compiler and the executables are.
stevefan1999 8y ago
I really miss Pascal and Delphi. They're beautiful.
- chadcmulligan 8y ago
  You don't have to - they're still around
ckok 8y ago
Amazing, our Oxygene compiler, Delphi and FPC has solved all of these issues ages ago, perhaps it's time to let this article go after all this time. - 2.0 Types and scopes: Apple = type Integer; makes it a distinct type - 2.1 Array size: dynamic arrays - 2.2 Admittedly, not exactly solved, but classes are how we hide variable these days. - 2.3 Oxygene doesn't care about order of things - 2.4: Long solved - 2.5: While allowed; something can be said for using an alias here to make the intent obvious; the in set is also solved in Oxygene since c in ['a'..z'] compiles to c >='a' and c <='z'. - 3: boolean shortcircuitry has long been part of Pascal - 4: With streams apis this is no longer a thing - 5: xor/or has lng been part of the languages, the semicolon issue seems a style issue to me, not a big deal (edit: had to insert enters to make it readable)
- jstimpfle 8y ago
  I've used Delphi in the last year and, while I hated it overall, there were a few things I liked about it. It's really nice that it compiles so quickly. And it feels very principled, at least the Pascal baseline. The main problem I remember is that you cannot simply use pointer types, or other complex types, as function parameters. You always have to declare a typedef first, such that the type that is used in the function signature is a single word (named reference to the typedef). Working on a compiler myself, I understand from an implementation perspective why Wirth did this, but this is really lazy. From a developer's perspective, to me that's next to unusable. It's really stressful to predeclare pointer types before using them, and using names like TypeP, TypePP and so on is much less readable than simple ^Type, ^^Type, etc. Another thing that's driving me crazy is case insensitivity. I would never willfully choose a language with case insensitive identifiers. It's driving me nuts. > 2.2 Admittedly, not exactly solved, but classes are how we hide variable these days. global initialized variables are really important to me to avoid unnecessary boilerplate and indirection (which is just as painful as not having initialized globals). What I did was initialize them in the initilization section. But it was another major inconvenience.
  - kbp 8y ago
    > Another thing that's driving me crazy is case insensitivity. I would never willfully choose a language with case insensitive identifiers. It's driving me nuts. What about it annoys you? Do you often define a lot of variables whose names differ only by case, in languages that let you? Common Lisp normally behaves as though it were case insensitive, and I've never found that to be a pain point.
stesch 8y ago
I was indoctrinated by this text. A fan of C and C style languages. And I feel this was so wrong and that the world could be a better place if we would have turned into another direction.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  It happened to me, too. This and several other cases demonstrate the value of independent thinking, investigating the matter yourself rather than following the crowd. This is happening also these days: two years ago it was Big data, last year it was microservices and "serverless" and so on.
  - WalterGR 8y ago
    and so on. Back until the dawn of computing. And the dawn of technology before that. And the dawn of humankind before that. And so on.
augustk 8y ago
For those interested, Oberon is the current Pascal. It is also designed by Niklaus Wirth. I use the OBNC compiler (https://www.miasap.se/obnc https://www.miasap.se/obnc).
- nurettin 8y ago
  Perhaps in a way, OBNC is the successor to Pascal considering Pascal's history with Niklaus Wirth, but then, Delphi appears to be a better candidate for being the "current pascal" considering Anders Hejlsberg's commercial success in creating widely-adopted languages.
  - augustk 8y ago
    OBNC is just a compiler. Whereas other languages evolve by adding more and more features, Oberon seem to converge to a set of features which are tried, tested, orthogonal and (most important) essential. Wirth has been very careful not to introduce any misfeatures.

31 points by dsego 8y ago

It's an interesting read and at the same time a relief to realize that many if not most of the problems have been addressed years ago. E.g. sorting an array in FreePascal is a very simple task (not to mention that dynamic arrays and generics are also supported).

clouddrover 8y ago
And in the recent versions of Delphi you can use TArray which supports generics and simply call its Sort method: http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Rio/en/System.Generics.Collections.TArray.Sort http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Rio/en/System.Gener... It's a shame more people don't use Object Pascal. I like it a lot.
nine_k 8y ago
It's funny that generics are supported in Pascal, but not in its spiritual successor, Go. (Of course, Go's succession goes not directly from Pascal, but through Modula-2 and Oberon.)
- agumonkey 8y ago
  is the discussion about Generics over in golang-dev ?
- magicalhippo 8y ago
  Delphi has compile-time generics, which is kind of a "worst of both worlds" approach. It has all the constraints of templates, but none of the benefits of run-time instantiated generics like .Net has. For example you can't make a generic function that uses the + operator to add two parameterized elements together, because there's no way to constrain the types to only those which has the + operator defined. But unlike templates in C++, the compiler doesn't just try and see if it works but rather emits an error.

clouddrover 8y ago

This article pops up every now and again. Most of the criticisms are no longer valid. Pascal has moved on in the last 38 years. If you don't know modern Pascal then check out Free Pascal, Lazarus, and Delphi: https://www.freepascal.org/ https://www.freepascal.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi (And Delphi documentation at http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/ http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/ )

acqq 8y ago
Specifically, just two years after the title text was written, in 1983, there was already Turbo Pascal which was much more useful than the language as defined for the introductory university classes: http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/20693 http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/20693 It was the fastest compiler and environment of the time, but additionally, even before 1983, the "minimal" form of the language, suitable for teaching, was almost never used in production. What was used in production did have the necessary extensions which allowed having some very good software, with provably less bugs than C, because the basis was good and safer. See also MacPaint, developed also around 1983 ("finished in October 1983"), in Apple Pascal: https://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw-source-code/ https://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw... Even Go language took its influences from Pascal, "rediscovering" some aspects that were obviously better (for the humans writing programs) than C.
- ptrott2017 8y ago
  I think Go was more influenced by Pascal's descendent's notably Oberon-2 (Pascal ->Modula 2/3 ->Oberon) thanks to Robert Griesemer, but definitely an indirect but significant influence.
- rob74 8y ago
  Actually the influence of the Pascal family and that of the C family are about equally significant, if you go by the chart from the "Go Programming Language" book (available in the free preview, page xiii https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Addison-Wesley-Professional-Computing/dp/0134190440/ https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Addison-Wesley-P...). Most significant is probably the module system, which, in good Turbo Pascal tradition, allows Go to run loops around other C-family languages (looking at you Rust ;) ), and of course the declaration syntax ("i int" instead of "int i"). Since I first came across Go I've been thinking that a Go-based Delphi clone would be really amazing. Maybe someone could breathe some new life into the Lazarus IDE by adding support for Go? Hmmm, actually there already is something: https://github.com/ying32/govcl https://github.com/ying32/govcl - probably worth keeping an eye on...

analognoise 8y ago

My usual shoutout to Lazarus/FreePascal go here: They're really wonderful, modern, well-maintained and ready for professional work. If you've experienced 100MB Electron garbage and are tired of it, or you think C++ is a tangled mess and want no part in it, and you need something LGPL that has a wonderful community, check it out.

sysrpl 8y ago

If anyone cares for an overview of Lazarus and Free Pascal, here are a few resources: https://www.getlazarus.org/new/ https://www.getlazarus.org/new/ https://www.getlazarus.org/learn/language/lexical/ https://www.getlazarus.org/learn/language/lexical/ ... and the searchable online reference: http://docs.getlazarus.org/#rtl+system+tobject# http://docs.getlazarus.org/#rtl+system+tobject#

romwell 8y ago

Good thing that we aren't using languages the way they were in 1981 anymore. As for Pascal, TurboPascal has been revolutionary, and it came out in 1983, two years after this article came out. TP, the lightning-speed IDE, debugger and compiler in one small executable pushed Pascal to its peak popularity; Delphi was another revolution. These days, Lazarus would be the go-to modern Pascal successor. (Delphi is still here, but is very much non-free; Lazarus is FOSS).

tokyodude 8y ago
Someone told me TurboPascal was actually Modula-2 just named "Pascal" for marketing. Where they wrong?
- mannschott 8y ago
  Yes. Most obviously Modula-2 is is case-sensitive, while (Turbo)Pascal is not. Also Modula-2 addresses the danging-else problem in Pascal, while TurboPascal does not. It wouldn't surprise me if TurboPascal addressed some of the same deficiencies in Pascal that Wirth also addressed in Modula-2, but they probably do so differently.
- pjc50 8y ago
  No, it was definitely Pascal. There's certainly quite a lot of stylistic crossover between the two languages but they are distinct.

jonathanstrange 8y ago

I used to be a language snob until I realized that the choice of language is pretty much irrelevant. What counts is the tooling, the available libraries and framework, and sometimes also how fast the compiler and the executables are.

stevefan1999 8y ago

I really miss Pascal and Delphi. They're beautiful.

chadcmulligan 8y ago
You don't have to - they're still around

ckok 8y ago

Amazing, our Oxygene compiler, Delphi and FPC has solved all of these issues ages ago, perhaps it's time to let this article go after all this time. - 2.0 Types and scopes: Apple = type Integer; makes it a distinct type - 2.1 Array size: dynamic arrays - 2.2 Admittedly, not exactly solved, but classes are how we hide variable these days. - 2.3 Oxygene doesn't care about order of things - 2.4: Long solved - 2.5: While allowed; something can be said for using an alias here to make the intent obvious; the in set is also solved in Oxygene since c in ['a'..z'] compiles to c >='a' and c <='z'. - 3: boolean shortcircuitry has long been part of Pascal - 4: With streams apis this is no longer a thing - 5: xor/or has lng been part of the languages, the semicolon issue seems a style issue to me, not a big deal (edit: had to insert enters to make it readable)

jstimpfle 8y ago
I've used Delphi in the last year and, while I hated it overall, there were a few things I liked about it. It's really nice that it compiles so quickly. And it feels very principled, at least the Pascal baseline. The main problem I remember is that you cannot simply use pointer types, or other complex types, as function parameters. You always have to declare a typedef first, such that the type that is used in the function signature is a single word (named reference to the typedef). Working on a compiler myself, I understand from an implementation perspective why Wirth did this, but this is really lazy. From a developer's perspective, to me that's next to unusable. It's really stressful to predeclare pointer types before using them, and using names like TypeP, TypePP and so on is much less readable than simple ^Type, ^^Type, etc. Another thing that's driving me crazy is case insensitivity. I would never willfully choose a language with case insensitive identifiers. It's driving me nuts. > 2.2 Admittedly, not exactly solved, but classes are how we hide variable these days. global initialized variables are really important to me to avoid unnecessary boilerplate and indirection (which is just as painful as not having initialized globals). What I did was initialize them in the initilization section. But it was another major inconvenience.
- kbp 8y ago
  > Another thing that's driving me crazy is case insensitivity. I would never willfully choose a language with case insensitive identifiers. It's driving me nuts. What about it annoys you? Do you often define a lot of variables whose names differ only by case, in languages that let you? Common Lisp normally behaves as though it were case insensitive, and I've never found that to be a pain point.

stesch 8y ago

I was indoctrinated by this text. A fan of C and C style languages. And I feel this was so wrong and that the world could be a better place if we would have turned into another direction.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
It happened to me, too. This and several other cases demonstrate the value of independent thinking, investigating the matter yourself rather than following the crowd. This is happening also these days: two years ago it was Big data, last year it was microservices and "serverless" and so on.
- WalterGR 8y ago
  and so on. Back until the dawn of computing. And the dawn of technology before that. And the dawn of humankind before that. And so on.

augustk 8y ago

For those interested, Oberon is the current Pascal. It is also designed by Niklaus Wirth. I use the OBNC compiler (https://www.miasap.se/obnc https://www.miasap.se/obnc).

nurettin 8y ago
Perhaps in a way, OBNC is the successor to Pascal considering Pascal's history with Niklaus Wirth, but then, Delphi appears to be a better candidate for being the "current pascal" considering Anders Hejlsberg's commercial success in creating widely-adopted languages.
- augustk 8y ago
  OBNC is just a compiler. Whereas other languages evolve by adding more and more features, Oberon seem to converge to a set of features which are tried, tested, orthogonal and (most important) essential. Wirth has been very careful not to introduce any misfeatures.