GNU Pascal Compiler Released For Mac OS X

MacDaffy writes "Kudos to Adriaan Van Os: He has produced a 'second prerelease' of the GNU Pascal compiler for Mac OS X. Work actively proceeds on porting the Carbon Pascal Interfaces for use with it (longtime Macintosh Pascal guru Peter N Lewis has already gotten a great start on this). Thanks to Adriaan, Peter, and Bill Catambay of Pascal Central for helping take Pascal on Macintosh into the future."

Comments

Re:What is really wrong with it?

[jaoswald]

That's a very interesting question. I'm not sure there is a very compelling answer, however.

Some of it is simply fashion: as C grew in popularity, it simply overtook Pascal in the new APIs that were developed. Once Pascal interfaces to the Mac OS became second-class citizens, there was no reason to favor it.

Another part of it is that Pascal was originally a teaching language, meant to indoctrinate structured programming. It deliberately tries to hide machine or OS-level reality with an idealized abstraction. It was not meant as a flexible all-purpose language like C. You couldn't write an OS kernel in Pascal very easily. One specific area in which it lacks flexibility is type conversion. For pointer or scalar (enum & integer) types, it really wants you to pick one type and stick with it. Good for enforcing discipline on software engineering students learning to design structured data types, poor for hackers who need to deal with the not-so-disciplined reality.

Another area where it lacks is file I/O. The standard doesn't really define byte-level results of its file operations, so reading/writing files compatible with other languages/API's depends on vendor extensions, which aren't uniform.

Similarly for structure layout. Although it isn't 100% defined, you can usually convince any C compiler on a given platform to agree with any particular arrangment of bytes in a structure. It's much harder with Pascal. This means that no matter what your OS, C code can be written mostly independent of compiler vendor, or at least with the nastiness hidden in header files.

Pascal also has a pretty inflexible (perhaps a bit clumsy) structure for writing your own libraries (units). In C implementations, you write a bunch of routines, a header file for users to #include, and make a .o file, and you are most of the way there. I.e., any program that doesn't have "main()" defined yet is a library waiting to happen. In Pascal, it is just slightly less convenient.

There are also a couple of omissions. I believe many implementations did not allow functions to return structure types. That's what drove me to C from Pascal many years ago. I believe arbitrary length arrays are also a bit clumsy to work with (not like C where you can have null-terminated arrays and use pointer arithmetic to navigate). Polymorphic types & pointers are clumsier in Pascal (no void* to ignore the differences when you want to.)

In general, Pascal works fine if you are writing a single application that requires only interfaces & libraries that your compiler vendor knew about. TeX by Knuth is an example. His programs (at least of that era) are monoliths, not collections of libraries and interfaces. You need to tweak a few routines to work with a particular vendor/platform, and that's only because Knuth very consciously made it that way.

Once you start working with libraries from multiple sources, the Pascal model begins to strain.

The Pascal folks would say that "Extended Pascal" plus OS-specific extensions in most compilers allow you to overcome all of these. But the extensions only happened after C began spreading like a virus, helped by its exposing all the weaknesses in Pascals that lacked full extensions.

Re:Make the OTHER switch

[RevAaron]

...and some of us hate C because it is the embodiment of excessive syntax, confusing idioms, and a notorious inease of use. Not all languages are easier to program at the expense of power. I can't say that I'm a huge fan of Pascal (not touched it in years), but C is pretty far down on the list of languages if I had to use only one for the rest of my life.

C has its place, to be sure. So does Pascal. Neither have much of a place in my toolbox for what I do.

Apple may have lost you as a programmer, and you seem to think that is a huge loss on Apple's part. What killer app did you bring to another platform that they missed out on?

Pascal is junk. Free software forever.

RTFA. The port is of GNU Pascal. Which is free software. It's sad to see so many oSs h4k3rz associate C so closeley with Free software that there is no room for any other languages.

What does C do that Pascal doesn't?