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Comment by zvrba | Hacker News Reader

Having grown up on Borland Pascal, I have a sentiment for Pascal and its derivatives. I enjoyed programming in BP, and I'm not too happy that Pascal derivatives lost their popularity to C derivatives. (I was reading a bit about Modula 3 and got quite intrigued by its module system.)

But, users are few, fragmentation is high (Borland Pascal/Delphi, Object Pascal, Component Pascal; Modula-2 and Modula-3; Oberon, Oberon-2, Oberon-07, Active Oberon, Zonnon). How the heck are you supposed to choose when all those languages taken together have probaby about user base as "large" as that of common lisp? Plus, Oberon webpages at ETH look like abandoned.

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Delphi is very popular outside of the U.S: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=delphi,lisp

(I'll leave it to others to correct my Google Trends query to the proper search terms for Lisp variants -- or it could be that Lisp programmers tend not to Google their own language much :) )

In two decades as a professional programmer, I have only ever heard glowing remarks from Delphi developers about their environment. Certainly Eclipse and even Smalltalk can't match that.

Delphi 6 and 7 were the best IDE's of their time, way better than Visual Studio 6. The language was great for the time, there was a vibrant community around it, you could find a component for everything. Borland also shipped the sources for their main library, VCL, which helped a lot when debugging. It was the best way to do Rapid Application Development.

Unfortunately, the company lost it's focus, they've tried to move to .net and the next few versions of the IDE were really buggy. The language also lagged behind C#/Java, they didn't add full Unicode support until 2009, for example.

They're no longer lagging. The most recent version has a new ui framework that is hardware accelerated and cross-platform (a pretty unique combination). You can even make iOS apps with it.

I know, it's impressive. If I'll ever have to do a non-dotnet app, Delphi will be the first thing on my list.

I wonder how good their cross-platform fu is if they don't have a mac version of the IDE.

As far as I know they are using FreePascal as well.

Not to mention the super fast compile times when compared with "#include" languages.

So is Clipper, but I don't consider it a good thing.

Clipper the dBase III extension language? People still use that?

Dang - should have held onto those manuals.

Just look into Stack Overflow.

http://stackoverflow.com/tags/clipper/topusers

It's not as popular as VB6 ;-)

http://stackoverflow.com/tags/vb6/topusers

I'm happy that Pascal lost:

- Everything new that Pascal had (record file io, for example) were suboptimal. Everything useful in Pascal came from C (including loop controls).

- Useful things from C are bolted on Pascal in gross, inconsistent and ugly way. E.g. break; loop construct is a procedure! Lol, what?

Pascal heritage is Algol not C.

Since Pascal lost, we gained buffer overflows exploits everywhere, thanks to a language that does not provide proper safer constructs coupled with bad developers everywhere.

The problem is, you can't do any real work in Pascal without resorting to the same unsafe constructs. Delphi is a kind of useful Pascal and it totally does have those.

Yes you can.

Do you really need pointer arithmetic, null terminated strings and array downgrade to pointers for real work?

Because every other language in the planet is able to deliver real work without them. Even the ones that existed before C.

Okay, then where is the work done in Pascal? Research projects excluded.

Mac OS was created in Pascal originally, http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596007195.do

Skype was originally created in Delphi, before being ported to Qt.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/5/prweb8476410.htm

Pixel32 is done with FreePascal http://www.kanzelsberger.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Studio_Pro

Atmel AVR-Microcontrollers programmed in Pascal http://www.e-lab.de/index_en.html http://www.mikroe.com/eng/categories/view/2/compilers/

Should I keep posting examples?

Or for you is Pascal only the very first release of the standard, which was only planned for education purposes?

Was Mac OS so secure and crash-free because it was written in Pascal? I've heard otherwise.

Most of other examples are about a thin layer of Pascal on top of (unsafe and non kosher) C.

I said created, not maintained, if you read the book you will see later generations were later rewritten in C.

Of course you have to write on top of C, because that is what, sadly most operating systems are still written today.

But even that is slowly changing, when we look at the way operating system development is evolving, with safe layers on mini kernels, like Google is doing with Android or Microsoft with WP/WindowsRT/Singularity.

Anyway, I am stopping here, as won't convince you of anything and you won't convince me.

> loop construct is a procedure! Lol, what?

Common Lisp's loop is a macro, Smalltalk's are method calls (with blocks), work fine.

That's not the case in Pascal though. Neither `for` nor `while` are procedures, as in C they're special forms of the language.

Macro is okay. Procedure is not okay. Break is a procedure.

> Macro is okay. Procedure is not okay. Break is a procedure.

Why do you believe this to matter? Smalltalk's signaling and exception handling (both `catch` and `finally` equivalent) uses regular messages and blocks (with hooks into the interpreter obviously). What value do you see in making special syntax things which need not be so, ease of "optimizations" (such as compiling a block to a jump)?

Why is it not okay? Any lisper will tell you using a function is always preferable to using a macro, if at all possible.

C is a strict and beautiful. Pascal is "Here you have your ugly break; because you too weak to live without it".

Yes, I have a collection of works of art entitled "buffer exploit", placed next to the "dangling pointer" exhibition hall.

It is sooo beautiful.

Don't you understand the sheer beauty of the undefined behavior? It is not the beauty of a great painting, it's the beauty of the winter mountain: shining, tantalizing, with the stability of a marble on a needle and ready to take your life at the lightest sneeze.

If you think C is strict, then you've never looked at the ANSI C standard.

I've looked at Delphi, thank you.

Pascal has had labeled goto from its conception. Break is just an extension / syntactic convenience. Even in C and C++ i still use goto when I have to break out of multilevel loops.

Try Ada? It's a Pascal family language, with support in GCC and a lot of rather nifty features.

The gcc Ada support is actively developed and maintained by AdaCore. You can even get paid support if that's your thing.

i love Ada and i think it is the real jewel.

Me too.

If they had had better industry support, maybe we wouldn't be suffering so many buffer exploits in our software.

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