On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 11:59 AM, Johnny Billquist <[email protected]> wrote: > > Pascal is also pretty far down the list. In some ways, Pascal will cause > you bigger problems.
Traditional (pure) Pascal - a very very true (and sad) observation. Although, I still have a soft spot for it and think its the best >>teaching<< language ever (beat's Python, Java and C/C++ which seem to be what most of the young folks learn first]. > String handling is often rather restricted and weird in Pascal. I agree with you. What Wirth has in the report is pretty simplistic (and I hated it). In fact, later Pascal's added pretty sophisticated support for strings -- but... in lots of different ways -- I remember at Tektronix on the early 1980s we counted about 10 different Tek Pascal's (at the same Hatfield/McOy party we also counted over 30 different HP Basics). The different Pascal extensions of course was a huge downfall of Pascal IMO -> there were too many differences and not enough commonality. But alas Pascal/Modula/Sail/Ada (and BLISS) et al lost to C for economic reasons not really technical ones [says a long time programmer that has written way for C code than anything else in my life]. That said, the good news is that Free Pascal [ http://www.freepascal.org ] which Dan wants to use supports most of the modern Pascal extensions, and in particular the "Delphi" & TP flavors *"The language syntax has excellent compatibility with TP 7.0 as well as with most versions of Delphi (classes, rtti, exceptions, ansistrings, widestrings, interfaces). A Mac Pascal mode, largely compatible with Think Pascal and MetroWerks Pascal, is also available. Furthermore Free Pascal supports function overloading, operator overloading, global properties and several other extra features."* > > Well, of those choices (including Pascal), I's say that C++ would probably > be the easiest to target. I have to laugh when I read this. I actually disagree on that observation and I admit I'm a little surprised to hear it from a European - many (most) of my European trained colleagues in the technical languages team here hate C++ and wonder out loud why the Algol family did not win ("You damned Americans didn't know <insert your favorite comment here>"). It's funny we were just arguing about this at lunch last Friday. One of them was calling the designers and implementors of a large programming system "incompetent" for picking C++ when they could have used Modula-II or ever Ada in those days. [Check out a great treatise: "The big problem we face isn't coordinated cyber-terrorism, it's that software sucks" - https://medium.com/@felixsalmon/this-is-a-very-lightly-edited-version-of-my-gist-spiel-3fb7eee4c4e5 ] Anyway, for someone comfortable with Pascal or Modula for similar family, I think using Free Pascal should not be much different than using C++ -- you pretty have all of the same tools at your disposal. It's about how much you know how to bring to bear on the problem. > > > I''ll probably go with freepascal as I have tons of libraries I've >> written already. >> > That seems like as good a reason as any I have heard. Clem
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