On Sat, 26 Jan 2013, Alexander Klenin wrote:
On Sat, Jan 26, 2013 at 4:38 AM, Michael Van Canneyt
<mich...@freepascal.org> wrote:
WITH EACH ADDITIONAL "FEATURE" WE ARE BUTCHERING PASCAL MORE AND MORE.
Hm... Do not you think this is a bit of an overstatement?
No, not really. I really feel that we are deviating a lot from what pascal
stands for.
If you mean the original Wirth's definition -- then yes, of course any
change to the language does move it away from the initial state.
However, I am strongly against such a "walled garden" approach to the
language design.
The state of the art in programming languages has advanced
considerably in the last 40 years,
and the set of features expected from modern language has become quite
different too.
I disagree that freezing at Wirth's (or current, or any fixed)
definition is a useful plan for Pascal development.
I don't see it like that. Donald Knuth declared TeX as finished.
Despite that, it has been doing just fine for its intended purpose.
You can always find things missing in any language.
I miss compilation, and other low-level things in Python.
It depends on what you value.
I certainly agree that Pascal has some advantages -- and they often
outweigh disadvantages.
Otherwise, I would be in Python's mailing list now, arguing to add
some of the Pascal's features :)
However, this does not mean that disadvantages should be just ignored.
I didn't say that.
Like I said, I am not against new language features per se.
I just don't think that this one is one that should be added.
Pascal needs more useful libraries.
It is important to note that default libraries ARE part of the language
You are wrong there.
Well, this is a matter of opinion of course, but note that your
opinion on this topic is again different from the usual one:
If I cared about 'usual opinion', I would be using C#.
I am talking about libraries that perform actual tasks. Not containers.
PDF generating, https protocol and whatnot. Those are definitely not part of
the language.
Yes, and even those. For example, lack of network support in C++
standard library is
widely considered a disadvantage for the language.
Conversely, presence of such support in Go and Python is hailed as
good language feature.
Note that technically, of course, the distinction exist -- what I am
talking about is that
from user's POV they are the same.
The student will have to remember 4 different syntaxes.
For a:=b to c do
for a:=b downto c do
for a in b do
for a in b index c do
Concise ? I don't think so.
Compared to the 10 methods of iterating over container just in the current
FPC+Lazarus code? Yes, I think this *is* concise and clear.
There is only 1 method:
for i:=0 to I.Count-1.
And let us not forget that the last one is a highly abstract one, because
you need a lot of concepts before you can explain why it is needed and how
to use it. The first one, by contrast, is so simple that any 12-year old can
get it.
Actually, I do teach young students (12 years old is somewhat too
young, but 13-14 is usual).
I can tell you they have *more* trouble with Pascal style of loop with indexing
as compared to Python's for-each with index.
You want to tell me that
for i:=1 to 10 do
Writeln(i);
is less clear than
for i in range(1,10)
printf(i) # or whatever python uses.
For someone versed in Python, I can imagine that probably is so.
But I learned from BASIC, and had absolutely no problem understanding it.
Michael.
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