4 ms·

Turbo Pascal/Delphi/Free Pascal evolved since Pascal, and cover quite a bit of the feature set of Oberon, as far as I can tell. The main improvement I see is t

Turbo Pascal/Delphi/Free Pascal evolved since Pascal, and cover quite a bit of the feature set of Oberon, as far as I can tell. The main improvement I see is the implied handling of multiple statements in an if-then-else-end. It seems like it would eliminate a lot of begin/end pairs, so I like it. Wirth's decision to revert to Case sensitivity was a bad one. With the exception of replacing "Uses" with "Import", it looks identical to Free Pascal/Delphi.

musicale 4y ago
Not entirely sure why people are downvoting your perspective. There are at least two object lineages for Pascal: one leading to Oberon and the other to Delphi. Both to semi-obscurity, but there is a lot to like in the Pascal language family in my opinion. Personally I find the syntax to be simple and attractive. Even though I spend a lot of time writing C-style languages, I don't have any trouble reading Pascal-style syntax. My complaints about Ada and VHDL, which seem to have Pascal-inspired syntax, are they they feel a bit verbose compared to C++ and Verilog. On the other hand, Ada supports concurrency and memory safety, and has packages for dimensional analysis of physical units, and VHDL supports pluggable implementations.
pjmlp 4y ago
While uppercase keywords is a bummer, many IDEs support automatic capitalization. One thing from Oberon linage that Turbo Pascal/Delphi/Free Pascal lack, is automatic memory management (with the exception for COM based types).
- mikewarot 4y ago
  No garbage collection, but Strings... it handles those brilliantly, you never need to allocate them, and they are automatically reference counted, and just work, even with a gigabyte of ascii in them. It's the best of both worlds. No GC pause, yet you can have huge strings in memory, return them from functions, all without issue.

4 ms·

Turbo Pascal/Delphi/Free Pascal evolved since Pascal, and cover quite a bit of the feature set of Oberon, as far as I can tell. The main improvement I see is t

by mikewarot 4y ago

musicale 4y ago
Not entirely sure why people are downvoting your perspective. There are at least two object lineages for Pascal: one leading to Oberon and the other to Delphi. Both to semi-obscurity, but there is a lot to like in the Pascal language family in my opinion. Personally I find the syntax to be simple and attractive. Even though I spend a lot of time writing C-style languages, I don't have any trouble reading Pascal-style syntax. My complaints about Ada and VHDL, which seem to have Pascal-inspired syntax, are they they feel a bit verbose compared to C++ and Verilog. On the other hand, Ada supports concurrency and memory safety, and has packages for dimensional analysis of physical units, and VHDL supports pluggable implementations.
pjmlp 4y ago
While uppercase keywords is a bummer, many IDEs support automatic capitalization. One thing from Oberon linage that Turbo Pascal/Delphi/Free Pascal lack, is automatic memory management (with the exception for COM based types).
- mikewarot 4y ago
  No garbage collection, but Strings... it handles those brilliantly, you never need to allocate them, and they are automatically reference counted, and just work, even with a gigabyte of ascii in them. It's the best of both worlds. No GC pause, yet you can have huge strings in memory, return them from functions, all without issue.