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30th Anniversary of Pascal

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the get-yer-code-on dept.

GrokSoup writes "UC San Diego is holding a public symposium on Friday, October 22nd, honoring the 30th anniversary of the Pascal programming language. Oh the memories of undergraduate bubble-sorts ..."

10 of 587 comments (clear)

  1. More serious apps... by grub · · Score: 5, Informative


    Pascal was more than just undergrad bubble sorts. The original Mac had all the hooks and development stuff in Pascal. If memory serves the Mac was the largest Pascal project going. Using C (Lightspeed C, circa 1986 or so) was a real bitch on the machine.

    --
    Trolling is a art,
    1. Re:More serious apps... by JPriest · · Score: 5, Informative

      Well there is Object Pascal which Delphi is based on. Delphi is losing popularity but is a very good (and underrated) language. The first GUI applications I made were in Borland Delphi.

      --
      Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
    2. Re:More serious apps... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually, the chief designer of C#, Anders Hejlsberg, was the chief architect of Turbo and then Object Pascal. He took many ideas from Object Pascal into C# and .NET.

    3. Re:More serious apps... by Retric · · Score: 4, Informative

      I was coding in Pascal today. It's just about the oldest GUI program I know of and it still works. It's a single app that handles a flat file database, a real time system for job dispatching with a great GUI, payroll, redundant backup over the network, job capture ect. And it's still readable after 14 years. Damm to bad Pascal lost out to C/C++.

    4. Re:More serious apps... by mertner · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yes, the 255-length limit on strings can be bothersome, and to address it a new dynamic string type with a 32-bit length was introduced in Delphi 2: AnsiString.

      That is 7 Delphi versions ago, btw, so it's not exactly new any more :-)

      The advantage of the "Short" strings is that they can be allocated on the stack and thus have no memory manager overhead, pointers etc associated with them - which makes them simple to use. And many strings *are* less than 255 chars, always.

      If you need longer strings, use Delphi 2 or later. The AnsiString implementation is certainly heads and shoulders above the std::string from the STL, which I have found to be astonishingly inefficient several times.

      I guess it's all a matter of taste :)

      --
      -- As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?
  2. Re:Started with QBasic by Gentoo+Fan · · Score: 4, Informative

    You could give Ruby a shot.

  3. Re:What do they teach in undergrad now? by lifeblender · · Score: 3, Informative

    Now they teach with Haskell, Scheme, Lisp, and C++. I'm not kidding about the Haskell or Lisp, at least at UT Austin. My first cs class, 307, (I skipped the basic C++ "Comp Sci II" class) was in Haskell, and man that was hard. Of course, once I learned Haskell I loved it, and __every other programming language in the world__ became easy once I took a second class in it. Other professors for the 307 class teach using Scheme. Later, I had lots of classes that used C++, one that suggested C++ or Lisp and let me use Haskell (Compilers), and a great class about ACL2 where I learned Lisp from Professor J Moore, an experience I'll never forget. So yeah, they hit us with Haskell (or Scheme) pretty early on, had a large focus on C++, and let the crazy professors teach in Haskell or Lisp if they wanted to.

    Some wackos at places like UT Dallas try to teach freshman about Java classes, but they'll learn that's not the right approach. ;) Try starting from the basics of programming, THEN move to data structures, not the other way around.

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  4. Niklaus Wirth's languages by plcurechax · · Score: 4, Informative

    Actually I (mildly) regret that I was an advocate for C and C++ in the university undergrad CS programmes, because at the time I personally enjoyed programming in C more than Pascal. Looking back I think Pascal was an excellent language for students, and I wish Niklaus Wirth's other languages, such as Module-2, Oberon caught on more. I think they were evoluting in the right direction of promoting good programming style, for programming in the large.

    Rather than quick coding by the seat of your pants which C encourages or at least strongly tolerates.

  5. FREE PASCAL! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Both apps are Free Software (GPL).

    www.lazarus.org

    www.freepascal.org

    Lazarus := Delphi-like (almost a clon) IDE for Win32 AND Linux. It's API independent: can use transparently GTK+, Windows graphic system... etc.

    FreePascal := Portable? no problem! It's available for different processors Intel x86, Motorola 680x0 (1.0.x only) and PowerPC (from 1.9.2). The following operating systems are supported: Win32, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, MacOSX/Darwin, MacOS classic, DOS, OS/2, BeOS, SunOS (Solaris), QNX and Classic Amiga.

    The language syntax is semantically compatible with TP 7.0 as well as most versions of Delphi (classes, rtti, exceptions, ansistrings). Furthermore Free Pascal supports function overloading, operator overloading and other such features.

    Try it! Or, at least visit the web sites.

  6. Re:Why didn't it succeed? by Cryogenes · · Score: 4, Informative

    Actually you are answering the wrong question. There was never any contest between C (the Unix language) and Pascal (a teaching language). The real tragedy was that the beautiful Algol succumbed to C so easily and so completely.

    But you are quite right, compilers where the reason. C.A.R.Hoare (of quicksort and CSP fame) tells a good story where early in his career he led an Algol compiler team into disaster - after two years of careful programming they produced a multi-pass compiler and when they first tested it, it managed to correctly translate 1 line of Algol per second!