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I wouldn't say Pascal completely "failed". e.g. Delphi was quite popular at some point.

kwhitefoot 5y ago
It still is. According to TIOBE (yes, I know it's not reliable) Pascal is currently more popular than Rust, F#, Cobol, Lua, Nim, etc.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  If we didn't already know it was not reliable, this alone would suffice to demontrate it. Citing TIOBE is like saying you're OK because anyway your mother loves you.
  - kwhitefoot 5y ago
    Can you provide a more reliable statistic?
ncmncm 5y ago
Pascal was crowded out of its niche by Delphi. It could have been supplanted by Modula-2, instead, or Oberon, UCSD Pascal, Object Pascal, Apollo Pascal, or any number of other languages with syntactic similarities to Pascal. But it wasn't. Pascal was displaced by K&R C for mainstream work, which was soon supplanted by C90. C90 has been displaced from serious development work by various C++ versions, although it hangs on in restricted niches, for historical reasons, usually as C99 and sometimes C11. C++98 has been largely supplanted by C++11, which is beginning to be supplanted by C++17 and C++20. It doesn't make sense to say that Pascal is alive when there is no one, anywhere writing code that could be compiled by any actual Pascal compiler, and no actual Pascal compilers for any current machine.
- Tozen 5y ago
  Delphi is the product name of the IDE. The programming language that Delphi uses is Object Pascal. Check the wikipedia or Embarcadero's website to confirm. Object Pascal is an extension of Pascal, that adds OOP. It is much tighter than the relationship of C to C++. You can write Object Pascal procedurally, where it closely resembles ISO 1983 or 1990 Pascal. By the way, there was a 1993 technical committee to add OOP to Pascal, which a lot comes from the various Object Pascal dialects. Be that as it may, the Borland/Embarcadero Object Pascal became the de facto standard. The other dialects of Object Pascal follows them. To say nobody uses Pascal/Object Pascal is disingenuous. Clearly people use and pay for Delphi (Embarcadero), Oxygene (Rem Objects), and Smart Pascal. Free Pascal/Lazarus and PascalABC are open-source projects with over 20 year histories, so they are not going anywhere, and are very much used.

It still is. According to TIOBE (yes, I know it's not reliable) Pascal is currently more popular than Rust, F#, Cobol, Lua, Nim, etc.

ncmncm 5y ago
If we didn't already know it was not reliable, this alone would suffice to demontrate it. Citing TIOBE is like saying you're OK because anyway your mother loves you.
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  Can you provide a more reliable statistic?

ncmncm 5y ago

Pascal was crowded out of its niche by Delphi. It could have been supplanted by Modula-2, instead, or Oberon, UCSD Pascal, Object Pascal, Apollo Pascal, or any number of other languages with syntactic similarities to Pascal. But it wasn't. Pascal was displaced by K&R C for mainstream work, which was soon supplanted by C90. C90 has been displaced from serious development work by various C++ versions, although it hangs on in restricted niches, for historical reasons, usually as C99 and sometimes C11. C++98 has been largely supplanted by C++11, which is beginning to be supplanted by C++17 and C++20. It doesn't make sense to say that Pascal is alive when there is no one, anywhere writing code that could be compiled by any actual Pascal compiler, and no actual Pascal compilers for any current machine.

Tozen 5y ago
Delphi is the product name of the IDE. The programming language that Delphi uses is Object Pascal. Check the wikipedia or Embarcadero's website to confirm. Object Pascal is an extension of Pascal, that adds OOP. It is much tighter than the relationship of C to C++. You can write Object Pascal procedurally, where it closely resembles ISO 1983 or 1990 Pascal. By the way, there was a 1993 technical committee to add OOP to Pascal, which a lot comes from the various Object Pascal dialects. Be that as it may, the Borland/Embarcadero Object Pascal became the de facto standard. The other dialects of Object Pascal follows them. To say nobody uses Pascal/Object Pascal is disingenuous. Clearly people use and pay for Delphi (Embarcadero), Oxygene (Rem Objects), and Smart Pascal. Free Pascal/Lazarus and PascalABC are open-source projects with over 20 year histories, so they are not going anywhere, and are very much used.