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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 ..."

4 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.

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    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.

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      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 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 :)

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