7 ms·

I remember taking AP Computer Science in high school and learning Pascal. Anyone else remember doing this? The AP Comp Sci exams were in Pascal until 1998.

gtrubetskoy 11y ago
Yep, you had to buy a floppy with TurboPascal for $5 I think... I actually liked it, some most fundamental things about programming "clicked" for me in the Pascal class. And then even found the skill useful to write stuff in Borland Delphi later on.
dragonwriter 11y ago
Yes, I did that too; took the test in 1990.
JasonFruit 11y ago
I didn't, because I started programming in earnest somewhat later in life — but I envy people whose first programming language was Pascal. It's not perfect, but it's at least a sensible language, and it enforces some good habits that other, less opinionated languages don't.
analog31 11y ago
My high school taught BASIC in 1981, but then I learned Pascal on my own because some of the nearby colleges were using it. When Turbo Pascal came out, my dad happened to read about it in the Wall Street Journal, and got me a copy for my birthday. I kept up with TP through version 5. I was dead certain that Pascal would displace C, and today, when I have to write in C, my programs are either Pascal-like, or wrong. The structure of Pascal seemed to be inherently geared towards teaching fairly disciplined programming. Maybe that was the point. I think that Pascal has helped me be a better programmer. Admittedly, I've always preferred "real programmers don't use" languages. But my other early influence was Steve Ciarcia. Real programmers program with a soldering iron. ;-)
- tsotha 11y ago
  >The structure of Pascal seemed to be inherently geared towards teaching fairly disciplined programming. Maybe that was the point. I think that Pascal has helped me be a better programmer. Niklaus Wirth would be pleased to hear that, since he designed Pascal to be a teaching language. He intended students to learn on Pascal and then graduate to Modula-2 for serious projects. I don't think Modula-2 ever really caught on, though.
  - anta40 11y ago
    >> I don't think Modula-2 ever really caught on, though. Oberon too. I wonder why Pascal (Object Pascal, to be precise) get most of the spotlight.
    - vidarh 11y ago
      Pascal had a commercial ecosystem by the time Oberon came along. And Oberon is austere where Pascal dialects grew all kinds of warts in the process of adding the features people asked for. Wirth took away features in almost every iteration of developing his languages - you see this in almost every language he touched going back to the 60's and Algol-W. It's been the guiding principle of most of his career to ruthlessly simplify. The Oberon-07 language report is 17 pages. Oberon takes more of an effort in following Wirth's mindset of addressing deficiencies by looking at how to make things simpler across the board (e.g. including for compiler writers) as opposed to the Pascal dialects which took the approach of addressing deficiencies by making things immediately easier for users to pick up, at the cost of additional complexity all over the place.
      - peterfirefly 11y ago
        The CDC-6600 Pascal compiler from ETH had several small extensions in the same style as Turbo Pascal to integrate better with the underlying platform. This is just to say that the culture of extensions/escape hatches didn't begin with Turbo Pascal.
  - bhaak 11y ago
couchand 11y ago
I took it during that brief, wonderful period when the test covered C++. The other semester of that year was supposed to be a hardware portion, restoring an old pinball machine. That never happened; I guess maybe the C++ curriculum just ballooned into a full year, or else we were playing too much Quake.
k-mcgrady 11y ago
In my country I took what I believe is an equivalent course in high school. We were using Pascal in 2007/8. I then did a short work placement at Borland (creators of turbo pascal) who laughed and were very surprised when I told them I'd been using pascal.
soohyung 11y ago
My high school taught Pascal in 2014, exams were Pascal too.
ajuc 11y ago
I had turbo pascal in middle school compter science lessons in 1999-2002. Also Object Pascal (Delphi or fpc) on university in 2003-2004. I think it works very well as first programming language (even though my first programming language was BASIC on C64). Pascal is very simple (skips over tons of corner cases and accidental complexity of C and C++), and strict enough to teach basic good habits unlike BASIC (or js or Python). I don't think strictly object oriented language like Java is good for learning programming, too much stuff that is irrelevant at first but required. And dynamic languages are nice after you know at least one static language.

gtrubetskoy 11y ago

Yep, you had to buy a floppy with TurboPascal for $5 I think... I actually liked it, some most fundamental things about programming "clicked" for me in the Pascal class. And then even found the skill useful to write stuff in Borland Delphi later on.

dragonwriter 11y ago

Yes, I did that too; took the test in 1990.

JasonFruit 11y ago

I didn't, because I started programming in earnest somewhat later in life — but I envy people whose first programming language was Pascal. It's not perfect, but it's at least a sensible language, and it enforces some good habits that other, less opinionated languages don't.

analog31 11y ago

My high school taught BASIC in 1981, but then I learned Pascal on my own because some of the nearby colleges were using it. When Turbo Pascal came out, my dad happened to read about it in the Wall Street Journal, and got me a copy for my birthday. I kept up with TP through version 5. I was dead certain that Pascal would displace C, and today, when I have to write in C, my programs are either Pascal-like, or wrong. The structure of Pascal seemed to be inherently geared towards teaching fairly disciplined programming. Maybe that was the point. I think that Pascal has helped me be a better programmer. Admittedly, I've always preferred "real programmers don't use" languages. But my other early influence was Steve Ciarcia. Real programmers program with a soldering iron. ;-)

tsotha 11y ago
>The structure of Pascal seemed to be inherently geared towards teaching fairly disciplined programming. Maybe that was the point. I think that Pascal has helped me be a better programmer. Niklaus Wirth would be pleased to hear that, since he designed Pascal to be a teaching language. He intended students to learn on Pascal and then graduate to Modula-2 for serious projects. I don't think Modula-2 ever really caught on, though.
- anta40 11y ago
  >> I don't think Modula-2 ever really caught on, though. Oberon too. I wonder why Pascal (Object Pascal, to be precise) get most of the spotlight.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    Pascal had a commercial ecosystem by the time Oberon came along. And Oberon is austere where Pascal dialects grew all kinds of warts in the process of adding the features people asked for. Wirth took away features in almost every iteration of developing his languages - you see this in almost every language he touched going back to the 60's and Algol-W. It's been the guiding principle of most of his career to ruthlessly simplify. The Oberon-07 language report is 17 pages. Oberon takes more of an effort in following Wirth's mindset of addressing deficiencies by looking at how to make things simpler across the board (e.g. including for compiler writers) as opposed to the Pascal dialects which took the approach of addressing deficiencies by making things immediately easier for users to pick up, at the cost of additional complexity all over the place.
    - peterfirefly 11y ago
      The CDC-6600 Pascal compiler from ETH had several small extensions in the same style as Turbo Pascal to integrate better with the underlying platform. This is just to say that the culture of extensions/escape hatches didn't begin with Turbo Pascal.
- bhaak 11y ago

couchand 11y ago

I took it during that brief, wonderful period when the test covered C++. The other semester of that year was supposed to be a hardware portion, restoring an old pinball machine. That never happened; I guess maybe the C++ curriculum just ballooned into a full year, or else we were playing too much Quake.

k-mcgrady 11y ago

In my country I took what I believe is an equivalent course in high school. We were using Pascal in 2007/8. I then did a short work placement at Borland (creators of turbo pascal) who laughed and were very surprised when I told them I'd been using pascal.

soohyung 11y ago

My high school taught Pascal in 2014, exams were Pascal too.

ajuc 11y ago

I had turbo pascal in middle school compter science lessons in 1999-2002. Also Object Pascal (Delphi or fpc) on university in 2003-2004. I think it works very well as first programming language (even though my first programming language was BASIC on C64). Pascal is very simple (skips over tons of corner cases and accidental complexity of C and C++), and strict enough to teach basic good habits unlike BASIC (or js or Python). I don't think strictly object oriented language like Java is good for learning programming, too much stuff that is irrelevant at first but required. And dynamic languages are nice after you know at least one static language.