30th Anniversary of Pascal

More serious apps... by grub · 2004-10-21 08:39 · 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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Re:More serious apps... by JPriest · 2004-10-21 08:57 · 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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Re:More serious apps... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-21 09:28 · 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.
Re:More serious apps... by ChaosDiscord · 2004-10-21 09:38 · Score: 5, Interesting

Pascal was more than just undergrad bubble sorts.

Though the world would have been a better place had it been so limited. My pet peeve was the weirdly brain dead default string implementation. Strings weren't null terminated, instead the length of the string was stored. That's a good idea. A bad idea is using the first byte of the string to hold the length. 8 bits to store the string length means a maximum string length of 255 characters. I worked on a large project that had originally been written in Pascal. We used p2c to convert it and maintained it in C. An early task was removing the 255 character long string brain damage and replace it with intelligent strings (in our case C++'s generally good and absolutely superior to Pascal's std::string). Still, I got to read and occasionally maintain the Pascal master for a variety of reasons. The code dealing with strings was always irritating. Sometimes it just ignored the problem (creating potential buffer overruns), sometimes it just crudely limited the string length (meaning, for example, that you couldn't have a URL longer than 255 characters), and sometimes it used some weird chained string extension that I never quite understood. Mac programmers I know told me that the 255 limit was pervasive throughout MacOS as late as MacOS 9. Most unfortunate.
(To be fair, it did seem like a pretty good language, and I really dug the "with" idiom. A healthy revision (that may have happened, I don't stay up to date on Pascal) could have turned it into something more mainstream and successful. Hell, let's be honest, I just wanted to bitch about the stupid strings...)

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Re:More serious apps... by mertner · 2004-10-21 10:30 · 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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Loved it!!!! by Jeffery · 2004-10-21 08:40 · Score: 5, Interesting

Loved Turbo Pascal, learned it in high school, was even remaking the first zelda on it, but was pixelizing everything, so it looked way better... sorry but that's pretty uber geek in my mind.. that was a long time ago.. this is also my first post, so i wish to formally introduce myself to the /. community!

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Re:Loved it!!!! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-21 08:55 · Score: 5, Funny

Hello an enjoy your stay. Remember, you are more than just a number to us, user 810339.

Niklaus Wirth by Black+Parrot · 2004-10-21 08:42 · Score: 5, Funny

"Europeans call me by name, Americans by value."

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Delphi (ObjectPascal) rules. by Franciscan · 2004-10-21 08:45 · Score: 5, Interesting

I use Pascal all day, every day. I laugh myself sick thinking how much time my C++ developer friends waste on stuff that takes days in ATL/MFC/C++ that I can do in a few seconds in Delphi. DCOM servers, GUI programming, reusable components, these are all a pain in the butt with C++. Okay, C# and Dotnet are almost as powerful as Delphi, but they have a huge runtime (like java). For my money, nothing can touch Delphi/ObjectPascal/VCL for efficiency, productivity, quality, easy deployability with NO DLL HELL and no runtime installation issues.
WP.(Franciscan)
(P.S. I never ever shipped any app with the BDE in it. That, and the Database Desktop, are the crappiest things ever to come out of Borland. They are still in the latest native Win32 version of Delphi, Delphi 7, but at least you don't ever have to use them.)

Memories of Pascal by Eberlin · 2004-10-21 08:50 · Score: 5, Insightful

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? by ucblockhead · 2004-10-21 08:51 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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Pascal... by jeif1k · 2004-10-21 09:08 · Score: 5, Interesting

It's unfortunate that Pascal gave type safety such a bad name: the language, as it was usually used for teaching, had such limited functionality and imposed such a straight-jacket on people that several generations of programmers thought type-safety made languages useless and that they needed to use something as unsafe as C to get any work done.

Yet, commercial implementations of Pascal were in pretty common use, had all the low-level facilities of C, and yet gave programmers a decent amount of type safety and runtime error checking. In fact, a lot of the early Macintosh software was written in ObjectPascal, and TurboPascal was very popular and very useful on the PC. Even the Apple II ran a pretty good Pascal development environment (in 64k of memory), with a decent screen oriented editor, menu bars, and an integrated compile/edit/run/debug system. Pascal syntax also was quite a bit less error prone than C/C++'s. Having pointer dereferencing be a postfix operator alone is just so much more sensible.

Perhaps much more interesting than Pascal, historically, are Algol-60, Simula-67, and Algol-68, which are related to it; Pascal was probably never intended to compete with them, but rather serve as an educational introduction to them and their successors. Around the same time, many fundamental ideas in programming languages were developed and implemented, including APL, Lisp 1.5, Snobol, PL/I, Smalltalk, and Prolog. Window systems, GUI toolkits, constraint-based programming, MVC, and other concepts we take for granted today followed shortly thereafter.

Re:ouch! by samjam · 2004-10-21 09:08 · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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OMG! you too! by museumpeace · 2004-10-21 09:31 · Score: 5, Interesting

Mac Pascal, Lightspeed C! I thought I was the only living person who climbed that learning curve. Problem was; it turned in to a learning cliff that I then fell off. I was good for nothing but assembler and BLISS for years until Pascal came along. This means we are due for a birthday party for the original MS-Basic pretty soon.
But didnt Pascal lead people to think of P-code which foreshadowed Java bytecode? a link off the article's link seems to agree with my memory...so i better not read it too carefully;)

and I certainly didn't use pascal just for academics. When I execavated the basement hole for my house, on an ostensibly unbuildable scrap of bedrock-studded land, a pascal contour mapping program that I wrote detected the one spot where the bedrock would be flat and need no blasting...back hoe guy was amazed an amateur could show him right where to dig.

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Welcome by lildogie · 2004-10-21 09:48 · Score: 5, Funny

> this is also my first post,
> so i wish to formally introduce myself to the /. community!

Welcome to Slashdot.

Just be careful with the words "first post!"

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