5 ms·
Having grown up on Borland Pascal, I have a sentiment for Pascal and its derivatives. I enjoyed programming in BP, and I'm not too happy that Pascal derivatives
by zvrba 15y ago
Having grown up on Borland Pascal, I have a sentiment for Pascal and its derivatives. I enjoyed programming in BP, and I'm not too happy that Pascal derivatives lost their popularity to C derivatives. (I was reading a bit about Modula 3 and got quite intrigued by its module system.)
But, users are few, fragmentation is high (Borland Pascal/Delphi, Object Pascal, Component Pascal; Modula-2 and Modula-3; Oberon, Oberon-2, Oberon-07, Active Oberon, Zonnon). How the heck are you supposed to choose when all those languages taken together have probaby about user base as "large" as that of common lisp? Plus, Oberon webpages at ETH look like abandoned.
- JulianMorrison 15y agoTry Ada? It's a Pascal family language, with support in GCC and a lot of rather nifty features.
- pjmlp 15y agoMe too. If they had had better industry support, maybe we wouldn't be suffering so many buffer exploits in our software.
- sehugg 15y agoDelphi is very popular outside of the U.S: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=delphi,lisp http://www.google.com/trends/?q=delphi,lisp (I'll leave it to others to correct my Google Trends query to the proper search terms for Lisp variants -- or it could be that Lisp programmers tend not to Google their own language much :) )
- rbanffy 15y agoSo is Clipper, but I don't consider it a good thing.
- bdunbar 15y agoClipper the dBase III extension language? People still use that? Dang - should have held onto those manuals.
- rbanffy 15y agoJust look into Stack Overflow. http://stackoverflow.com/tags/clipper/topusers http://stackoverflow.com/tags/clipper/topusers It's not as popular as VB6 ;-) http://stackoverflow.com/tags/vb6/topusers http://stackoverflow.com/tags/vb6/topusers
- stcredzero 15y agoIn two decades as a professional programmer, I have only ever heard glowing remarks from Delphi developers about their environment. Certainly Eclipse and even Smalltalk can't match that.
- pjmlp 15y agoNot to mention the super fast compile times when compared with "#include" languages.
- poloniculmov 15y agoDelphi 6 and 7 were the best IDE's of their time, way better than Visual Studio 6. The language was great for the time, there was a vibrant community around it, you could find a component for everything. Borland also shipped the sources for their main library, VCL, which helped a lot when debugging. It was the best way to do Rapid Application Development. Unfortunately, the company lost it's focus, they've tried to move to .net and the next few versions of the IDE were really buggy. The language also lagged behind C#/Java, they didn't add full Unicode support until 2009, for example.
- guard-of-terra 15y agoI'm happy that Pascal lost: - Everything new that Pascal had (record file io, for example) were suboptimal. Everything useful in Pascal came from C (including loop controls). - Useful things from C are bolted on Pascal in gross, inconsistent and ugly way. E.g. break; loop construct is a procedure! Lol, what?
- masklinn 15y ago> loop construct is a procedure! Lol, what? Common Lisp's loop is a macro, Smalltalk's are method calls (with blocks), work fine. That's not the case in Pascal though. Neither `for` nor `while` are procedures, as in C they're special forms of the language.
- guard-of-terra 15y agoMacro is okay. Procedure is not okay. Break is a procedure.
- lucian1900 15y agoWhy is it not okay? Any lisper will tell you using a function is always preferable to using a macro, if at all possible.
- guard-of-terra 15y agoC is a strict and beautiful. Pascal is "Here you have your ugly break; because you too weak to live without it".
- adestefan 15y agoIf you think C is strict, then you've never looked at the ANSI C standard.
- guard-of-terra 15y ago