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Thanks 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 d

Thanks 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 ago
May 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 ago
  Oh 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 ago
    Yes, 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 ago
      I 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

vram22 6y ago

May 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 ago
Oh 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 ago
  Yes, 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 ago
    I 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