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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

What is the current descendant of Pascal? Is it a child of Oberon or some Modula development.

Don't miss Nim.

I seriously view OCaml as a descendant of Pascal. If you look at some of its imperative syntax (for loops, while loops, mutable assignment), comments (* ... *), modular programming style (distinguishing interfaces and implementations), and fast compilation speed, it's clear that the OCaml engineers took a lot of Pascal's (and its descendant Modula-2) lessons to heart.

At the same time, OCaml's ML heritage greatly simplifies the majority of the syntax (getting rid of semicolons, making identifiers case-sensitive), and bringing the expressive power of functional programming.

It fuses together the best of both worlds. It's why I often say that OCaml is like a midpoint between Haskell and Go. The 'Go parts' are from their common ancestor, Pascal.

If you are looking for a free alternative - Free Pascal, for a commercial - RemObjects Hydra.

Hydra is their C#/Java/Delphi interop solution. Their Pascal language is Oxygene[1], part of their cross-language Elements solution[2].

[1]: https://www.elementscompiler.com/elements/oxygene/

[2]: https://www.elementscompiler.com/elements/default.aspx

https://spf13.com/presentation/on-the-shoulders-of-giants/

I doubt Go qualifies as a descendant of Pascal particularly with some of the things said about Pascal by the C / Go creators.

Go is influenced by several languages, and Modula and Oberon are at the top of that list. Robert Griesemer, one of the designers of Go, worked on Oberon at ETH Zürich.

Yes. The GoPL book has a diagram of Go influences (languages) near the start of the book.

The famous "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language" article was written by Brian Kernighan, not by Ken Thompson (who created Go). Kernighan wrote the books about C and Go.

I imagine Go is super disappointing for Wirth, it couldn't ever be called a successor to Pascal. To C, in some regards, maybe. To Pascal? Surely not.

I think that very much depends on your definition of "descendant", given how many language designers mention how much they were inspired by Oberon, Modula, or even just Wirth's writings in general. This is both on a technical level and on a language design level.

Historically speaking Go would qualify as being descended from Oberon, philosophically none of the current crop of languages would qualify, most of them being too complex and brining in elements Wirth wasn't too fond of (like most of FP).

Considering the Heijlsberg line of work ... It is first C# and then TypeScript :)

As someone who went from Delphi to C# to TypeScript that’s also how I see things

If you go by its creator it's Oberon-07 ("Revised Oberon").

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