30th Anniversary of Pascal

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 ..."

Comments

Memories of Pascal

[Eberlin]

It has been ages since I've done anything in pascal...but my programming language progression went from BASIC, QBASIC, then Pascal. I've moved to other languages from there but it was quite the eye-opener. Variables had to be declared, the "uses CRT" was quite the drastic change from what I had been used to (if I remember correctly), and the overall approach was enlightening.

Now there are other languages to learn with (and a few of those aren't just for educational purposes). Java, PHP, and C for example. Even Delphi has kept Pascal alive and relevant.

Back then, I had to find...um...creative ways to be able to program and compile Pascal code. With all the freely available IDEs, compilers, debuggers, etc. around now for all these various languages (especially through OSS), things have become more accessible.

Pascal was the language that brought me out of my BASIC habits...for that I'm definitely grateful.

Re:What do they teach in undergrad now?

[ucblockhead]

I find it unfortunate that Universities usually use "professional" languages like Java or (before that) C++ rather than a language specifically designed to be clear to new programmers. Unfortunately it means that students end up spending more time learning the oddities of the language than on programming in general.

It's like teaching people to drive with semi-tractor trailers.

Re:ouch!

[samjam]

Borland Pascal for Windows may have been a bit freakish but I don't see how you can say Delphi is or ever was.

I used Turbo Pascal for DOS to write real-mode device drivers that loaded before windows did that communicated and made callbacks to windows applications written in Delphi (using the DPMI 0.9 API)

There really was nothing that could not be done or hacked with Turbo Pascal (and assembly) and Delphi (and more assembly as needed).

Borland DID get windows, more than MS did.

None of MS widget wrappers around the raw windows API compare in any degree to Borlands excellent VCL (Visual Class Library) that encapsulated and extended windows in a most wonderful way.

I've seen people program in Delphi who only know how to program in C and it looked like it. Ugly, nasty code.

I've seen Delphi code written by people who understand object Pascal and it is a dream to behold. (I've done some good stuff too).

The reason Delphi didn't catch on enormously is partly to do with it not being a cross platorm language (object pascal I mean) butmostly for the same reasons smalltalk, scheme, EISA and so on didn't catch on. I wish I knew what that reason was.

Sam