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Pascal was one of my earliest exposures to programming. MS just released Windows XP, I was in high school. Back in those days, people used Basic, Pascal, and C
by anta40 6y ago
Pascal was one of my earliest exposures to programming.
MS just released Windows XP, I was in high school. Back in those days, people used Basic, Pascal, and C for programming competitions.
Already had some experiences with Basic, and found C to be too "low level" for my taste, I picked Pascal. Next year, I jumped into Delphi: learning Win32 GUI basics and some database programming with MySQL. Probably pretty advanced for a high school kids, since most of my friends were interested in music or games :)
I never used Pascal/Delphi for work though, because Java has been a major player in mobile development scene (J2ME -> BlackBerry -> Android....).
One of the things I appreciate about Pascal compilers is: blazing fast compile time. And I think it still applies to FPC (Free Pascal Compiler).
You can rebuild the whole compiler + basic libraries from scratch under 5 minutes. Can't say the same thing about GCC. Well the last time I did this was in 2014 (or 2015?), though.
Now, if I want a native compiler with fast compilation speed, I'd pick Go or Nim.....
- pjmlp 6y agoJava, .NET [0] and D do it for me. But I do share a similar Pascal story, just a decade earlier. :) [0] - People keep forgetting there are AOT toolchains (and JIT caches) for them.
- fmxexpress 6y agoThe latest version of Delphi compiles 1 billion lines of code in 5 minutes on a 16 core 5950X and 2 minutes on a 64 core 3990X.
- webmobdev 6y agoThanks for increasing my interest in FreePascal / Lazarus (which I've been looking into for the past few days.) We were taught C and Pascal in college, and I distinctly remember thinking out loud, "Wow. Why do people bother with C when Pascal seems so much easier to understand and just nicer?" (Ofcourse, in hindsight, I now know Pascal was easier to understand because I had already learnt programming concepts with C previously). But I still prefer Pascal's overall 'ideology' and syntax over C (except for the BEGIN ... END - would prefer braces :).
- vram22 6y agoMay be obvious to some, but the braces can be replaced by BEGIN and END keywords by multiple methods, including careful editor search and replace, or use of a preprocessor before compiling (may not handle tokens in strings or comments), or maybe the best option, by hotkey mappings, like BEGIN to some key combo, and END to another.
- webmobdev 6y agoOh yeah, I do know that with modern editors it's not such a chore anymore. I just mentioned that as an example of verbosity that slightly annoys me. (The same with Ada too, which I understand also draws inspiration from Pascal).
- vram22 6y agoYes, I get you now. Agree about the verbosity issue, although, interestingly, it did not bother me at all in Pascal, which I learned as my 2nd language or so, before C. Noticed it even in the syntax of BCPL (C's grandpa), and, IIRC, BLISS, and of course Eiffel. The 2nd- and 3rd-last above were before my time, only read about them in books. I like Eiffel for many reasons, though. A real pity it did not get more popular.
- vram22 6y agoI found BCPL quite cool too, except for the verbosity, which, like Pascal, I did not much feel at the time. I read the whole (slim) book about it, by Martin Richards, its creator, and enjoyed it. Good amount of low-level system programming examples in the book, and it all being in a language with only one type (the machine word), made it more fun to me, although (or because) I did not know of higher level programming constructs at the time. Its history and uses are interesting. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCPL https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCPL