# Anybody using Pascal here?



## waterstof (May 29, 2011)

Yesterday I kind of re-discovered Pascal. What I like about Pascal, is that it is clean and very easy to learn, yet very powerful. I have a tutorial here, from which I can learn a good base of the language in one day.  
Why is it, that this language seems to be quite forgotten? I always here about Lua, Python, C, Java, Haskell, Perl, Ruby, C++, ... but Pascal is never mentioned.
There's a free pascal compiler, the GNU pascal compiler, the Lazarus Project (which is very active),...
Can somebody explain why this language became so unpopular?

Thanks in advance...


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## graudeejs (May 29, 2011)

BEGIN
END

Is such a waste of typing....

I dunno, I didn't like this language from start

About question why Pascal isn't mentioned here... Well because it is not used in serious projects.
If you take a look, you'll see that there is no threads about Basic language as well (I prefer Basic over Pascal)
Also no talks about Assembler (Which I like a lot)


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## waterstof (May 29, 2011)

killasmurf86 said:
			
		

> BEGIN
> END
> 
> Is such a waste of typing....
> ...



It's probably a matter of taste (de gustibus non est disputandum).
And I'm probably one of the not-so-many who like it.
Thanks for your answer anyway


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## gkontos (May 29, 2011)

I think that the only high level languages that are popular are C and C++.

The main reason is that both are very flexible and powerful and can relatively easy be ported to different platforms.

There was a time when pascal was adopted by Borland giving a powerful RAD tool but that was only for windows development.


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## waterstof (May 29, 2011)

gkontos said:
			
		

> There was a time when pascal was adopted by Borland giving a powerful RAD tool but that was only for windows development.



Kalimera gkontos,

have a look at lazarus. Not only for Windows.


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## expl (May 29, 2011)

Pascal in its time had C as direct competitor, people preferred C as pascal had some limitations and in programming languages its either you are popular or you die, it's a kind of snowball effect. The field where pascal got popular was education, I think they are still teaching new students to program using pascal in some countries. There is very little commercial development using pascal/opascal these days, most of it is done in Russia as Delphi platform was very trendy in that country.


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## gkontos (May 29, 2011)

waterstof said:
			
		

> Kalimera gkontos,
> 
> have a look at lazarus. Not only for Windows.



Kalimera, are you using it? Any good? It will be fun to remember my old days


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## expl (May 29, 2011)

killasmurf86 said:
			
		

> About question why Pascal isn't mentioned here... Well because it is not used in serious projects.



I believe Skype is written in pascal(Delphi), at least the windows version's GUI code. Something to do with estonians writing it as pascal is mostly used in ex soviet union states.


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## carlton_draught (May 30, 2011)

I learned Pascal in high school. I liked it, but haven't seen a reason to use it since then. I think if you type fast, it doesn't matter how verbose a language is. All I care about is if a language is a good fit for what I'm doing.


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## graudeejs (May 30, 2011)

expl said:
			
		

> I believe Skype is written in pascal(Delphi), at least the windows version's GUI code. Something to do with estonians writing it as pascal is mostly used in ex soviet union states.



I really don't think so.
Try to dissasemble it with IDApro, you might get an idea of what it's made of


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## waterstof (May 30, 2011)

gkontos said:
			
		

> I think that the only high level languages that are popular are C and C++.



But is C suited to  write a database application (for a sqlite3 database) and to do text-processing? I always hear it's only used for system programming. Or is this to black/white?


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## graudeejs (May 30, 2011)

waterstof said:
			
		

> But is C suited to  write a database application (for a sqlite3 database) and to do text-processing? I always hear it's only used for system programming. Or is this to black/white?



You can do anything with it, then real question is how much time you will spend to finish your project, how much code you will need to write and How many "WTFs per line" you will have.


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## expl (May 30, 2011)

killasmurf86 said:
			
		

> I really don't think so.
> Try to dissasemble it with IDApro, you might get an idea of what it's made of



It's a fact, stands in Skype's wiki page.


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## graudeejs (May 30, 2011)

expl said:
			
		

> It's a fact, stands in Skype's wiki page.



Oh, I see


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## roddierod (May 31, 2011)

I was a Delphi (Pascal) programmer from 1999 until 2005/2006 when Borland started to move away from its Programming Tools to its Business Tools (I don't think it worked out).

Personally, I would not put C/C++ and Pascal on the same level. I'd never try to write a device driver or even system level daemons or services in Pascal (although in the Window world you could access the Win32 API directly in Delphi, you could also write inline Assembler). Where Delphi shined in the Windows world was RAD - Rapid Application Design - with MS Sql or Oracle. You simply could not beat the time it would take to develop an app in Delphi as compared to the same in C/C++.

Lazarus is/was not too bad. I haven't used it since 2001/2002 when I was seeing if it could replace Delphi. If your code was written in Object Pascal and you took out all the Delphi-isms, it was probably close to 100% cross platform. Most of the custom components that I had written for Delphi would not work in Lazarus so I had to give that up.

Now I use Python and I look at some old Delphi code and think, why the heck did I like this language?


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## _martin (May 31, 2011)

Hm, this topic seems to be an off-topic candidate. 



			
				roddierod said:
			
		

> You simply could not beat the time it would take to develop an app in Delphi as compared to the same in C/C++.



You are comparing two different things. Delphi was a full IDE. 

Try comparing Delpi to MS Visual Studio. Delphi was one big pain in the ass. Actually last good thing from Borland was Borland 3.11 Studio with their Turbo Vision libraries. Anything else was a miss. To my surprise MS Studio was very solid and good IDE for application development.


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## roddierod (May 31, 2011)

matoatlantis said:
			
		

> You are comparing two different things. Delphi was a full IDE.
> 
> Try comparing Delpi to M$ Visual Studio. Delphi was one big pain in the ass. Actually last good thing from Borland was Borland 3.11 Studio with their Turbo Vision libraries. Anything else was a miss.
> To my surprise M$ Studio was very solid and good IDE for appl development.



We used Visual Studio 6 before we switched to Delphi and the amount of C++ code that I had to write to access SQL server and retrieve data and populate Excel or flat files compared to the amount of Object Pascal was far greater and never used the VCL or MFC components of the IDEs for these functions. Other than basic GUI functions, I hate components.


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## flegma (Jun 30, 2011)

I'm from Romania, and teachers still teach Pascal in high school. The bad thing is they use the 16-bit Borland Pascal.


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## graudeejs (Jun 30, 2011)

flegma said:
			
		

> I'm from Romania, and teachers still teach Pascal in high school. The bad thing is they use the 16-bit Borland Pascal.



Tell me about it. Here in Riga Technical University, they teach, 16bit pascal, 16bit Borland C (The CLI one).

More than that, I was pissed when they were teaching to use some Borland/DOS specific libraries.


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## randux (Jun 30, 2011)

waterstof said:
			
		

> Yesterday I kind of re-discovered Pascal. What I like about Pascal, is that it is clean and very easy to learn, yet very powerful. I have a tutorial here, from which I can learn a good base of the language in one day.
> Why is it, that this language seems to be quite forgotten? I always here about Lua, Python, C, Java, Haskell, Perl, Ruby, C++, ... but Pascal is never mentioned.
> There's a free pascal compiler, the GNU pascal compiler, the Lazarus Project (which is very active),...
> Can somebody explain why this language became so unpopular?
> ...



Pascal was designed for teaching basic programming concepts by a guy with a chip on his shoulder. It was never intended to be a full programming language or have facilities for real work and it never did. The original compilers were one pass compilers, emphasis was on fast compiling, execution be damnned. The other languages (Borland Turbo) that had success were built to address these problems but they didn't follow the Pascal standard in fact they created their own standards and they had to because the original Pascal spec couldn't do even as much as the modern scripting languages you mentioned.

UNIX was written in assembly and then again in C. All of the headers in Linux and NIX are in C so C and C++ will always be popular choices on those systems. On other systems, C doesn't even show up on radar.

Most of why languages are successful or not has to do with what system you use and how much support there is for that language. People like to have header files and libraries.

If you like Pascal and you use *NIX you should really look at Ada. It is a wonderful language and can do everything C and C++ can and is safer. There is some amount of support for system coding with the gnat compiler front-end to gcc. It's a good choice for general programming across NIX but not as good of a choice as C for the reasons I mentioned.


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## randux (Jun 30, 2011)

killasmurf86 said:
			
		

> Also no talks about Assembler (Which I like a lot)



Then you would probably really like the systems I work on. Did you look into the old MVS and Hercules emulator? Or http://www.z390.org?

I don't know assembly on any other platform (I will try to learn Sparc) but I'll be glad to talk to anybody about assembler, of course we will have to go to the off-topic section here since everybody will assume we are nuts


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## fonz (Jul 1, 2011)

waterstof said:
			
		

> What I like about Pascal, is that it is clean and very easy to learn, yet very powerful.


Yes, Pascal is easy to learn (I learned it in high school, not from teachers but from books, friends and experimentation). And is very nicely structured indeed. There is after all a reason why compiler building classes often involve writing your own Pascal (or a subset thereof) compiler.

So, why are compiler building courses pretty much the only places where we still see Pascal nowadays?

Well, for starters, Pascal suffers from a very common problem: there are too many dialects. Second, *standard* Pascal (as far as there even is such a thing) lacks OOP facilities that are on par with what we see in e.g. C++ and Java. Third, it just so happens that UNIX was/is written in C (and assembler). As for Haskell (and other functional or logical languages, for that matter), that really is comparing apples and parachutes rather than apples and oranges.

Pascal is an excellent language from an educational point of view, but in practice no matter what you want to do, there always seems to be a language that's better for that particular job.

Fonz


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## pupok (Jul 4, 2011)

I know one who uses Delphi and Pascal nowadays.
He lives near me.


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## randux (Jul 4, 2011)

pupok said:
			
		

> I know one who uses Delphi and Pascal nowadays.
> He lives near me.



I also know a guy who writes Delphi for a living. Hard to believe, but it's true. His wife is a VB coder. I guess IDEs and weird HLLs run in the family


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## _martin (Jul 7, 2011)

killasmurf86 said:
			
		

> More than that, I was pissed when they were teaching to use some Borland/DOS specific libraries.



Depending on the subject it might not be the worse idea. Sure you won't use it (probably) any more but when you're learning you should start from the beginning. 

Back in my university we did the same. There was one semester with an assembler and DOS calls. It gave me an overview of some things and it was definitely worth it.


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