Coding in Pascal in The Modern Age

References:

[codehorror]

Object Pascal is my favourite language. It's used in most of the areas I work in: embedded, desktop and mobile. I wouldn't say it's lost the market, it's very active in other countries like Russia, Ukraine and China. When I went to Shenzhen I seen it used a lot. In the West, a lot of money is spent on advertising certain languages. I used to ride trends too. But since sticking with Object Pascal I am far more productive. It's fast. Small. Cross platform. Cross architecture. Lazarus and Delphi (if you want to pay), are the only solutions that allow you to create beautiful UI's that work everywhere. That's very important when developing products that interface with embedded devices. Thank you for posting this and showing the beauty of the language.

[oj]

Pascal has some really cool inline assembly support. You can just write an assembly block with normal assembly code, but you can e.g. mov directly into pascal variables.

[swwei]

What C programming language can do so can Pascal.
I have a smile web content stripping program developed in Free Pascal for linux x86_64,
and I have it compiled in my Raspberry Pi4, without changing a single line of code.
Thanks to The Free Pascal Team for their wonderful job keeping Pascal Language alive!

[wchen]

I started programming in Pascal back in the early 90s with that blue borland editor. I still map my compile&run hotkeys to Strg+F9 no matter which enviroment im messing around up on til today. Thanks for all the effort.

[ScoopexUs]

Pascal is a proper language. It has security that doesn't rely on compilation checks, and it's designed to make it difficult to introduce bugs, and to finish code and separate concerns with modules and interfaces. My years with Turbo Pascal, Delphi, and FreePascal have been Zen. I've written only maybe lines of code in these, but I can count on the fingers of one hand it has let unstable code through. It's much less crashy than other high- and low-level languages.

Plenty of text editors support Pascal syntax, but maybe they haven't bothered to update as the language has evolved? I haven't written much code in or for terminal/DOS since 1992. I much prefer to code for and in a GUI. Delphi and Lazarus have offered IDEs with great debuggers for decades, and the Lazarus forums are an active community for the Pascal dialects and cross-platform components and frameworks in 2022.

[afuyan]

Lazarus IDE: *exists*

"there's no editor for Pascal"

[neshkeev]

Idiomatically whenever you need to implement an empty loop you go with a repeat loop:
repeat until <CONDITION>;

Also you can (at least in turbo pascal) use the "return" keyword to return a value from a function, you don't have to assign a result to a pseudo variable named after the function's name

[superscatboy]

Borland Pascal was the language I was taught to program in at college (showing my age a bit here). It was a great language for the purpose - the verbosity literally spells everything out and really helps cement the concepts in the mind of the novice.

I have a lot of nostalgia for the language so I'm definitely biased, but one thing I'll defend to the death is colon-equals for assignment (read as "becomes equal to") and single-equals for equality testing. No double-equals anywhere, because double-equals is insane.

I also like the explicit distinction between functions and procedures, (and the ability to nest them). The unit system is pretty cool too.

If I was to design my "dream language", it would be *heavily* influenced by Pascal, despite the fact that C++ has been my bread and butter for aeons.

[anon_y_mousse]

This takes me back to my high school days when I learned Pascal to do UIL competitions. I never really tried hard and thus didn't go far, but it was kind of fun traveling several hundred miles to do regionals. I often wonder what could have been had I applied myself.

[replikvltyoutube]

Thank you for showing free Pascal. I didn't notice it has support for JVM compilation. I was interested in that topic and now I have sth to check out! 👍

[korrewabeats]

I'm being taught pascal at university and we've never even talked about dynamic arrays, we always use array[1..n] of variable, this is a paradigm change

[dnkreative]

It starts with program because there are also unit and library types of sources. And you don't have to have any external build system to specify what you actually want to build from your source. Also, program is the default one, you don't have to specify it.

[changx]

Pascal and Delphi are amazing languages, dunno why they aren't used enough

[Rene-tufc]

love those streams using unpopular languages. they really make you appreciate everything that's taken for granted in modern languages. And at the same time, they make me feel like I could eventually learn those languages as well. In the end it's all variables, pointers, loops, ifs and arrays, right?

[HairyPixels]

I've been programming Pascal since the 90s and I didn't know about the end. trick until now! Thanks for sharing I'll be using this for sure.

[emuhast]

I laughed so hard when you said: "This is what programming is all about: Doing some work that nobody understands, with a useless outcome".

[januszkszczotek]

Thanks for the bringing up very old memories. I learned programming in the 80s using Turbo Pascal 4.0 on an XT compatible. I still wonder how this was possible w/o any Internet.

[xravenxfe]

My first programming teacher taught us C++ on a super old version of Visual Studio with C string libraries and C++ IO and he still used the function/procedure terminology from Pascal to describe functions. conio.h header, string.h, and using namespace std, what a God forsaken combo lol but I never would have heard of Pascal if he didn't mention it, good times.

[apestogetherstrong]

freepascal supports generics, which is very cool. in general, this language is like a much better C, with some nice features of C++, but without the complexity :)

[TheSulross]

the relatively new programming language Odin draws a lot on a spiritual heritage from Pascal - yeah, it traded out begin/end for curly brackets but otherwise retains a fair amount of Pascal inspiration