Free Pascal 2.0 Released

Eugenia writes "After five years of development, Free Pascal 2.0 is ready and it includes support for many architectures and OSes. It now has threading support, interfaces, widestring and better Delphi support among many other new features. OSNews posted an article introducing the updated GPL compiler." petermgreen adds a list of some of the major changes since the last stable release: "Much better support for Delphi language features (especailly method pointers); more supported CPUs (AMD64, SPARC, PPC (32 bit), ARM) and platforms (Mac OS classic, Mac OS X, MorphOS, Novell Netware); a new and better structured Unix RTL Threading support; and a large number of internal changes including rewriting large parts of the compiler to make it more maintainable and easier to port to new architectures," and notes that "Visual parts of Delphi are being handled by a seperate project known as lazarus, which has not yet reached 1.0 but should do so fairly soon."

Comments

Out of curiousity...

[winkydink]

and not meant in a trollish way, but what is Pascal used for these days? What are it's inherent advantages over other languages?

Re:Out of curiousity...

[NetNifty]

First things that come to mind are prototyping and education - I'm sure I'm not the only /.er who was taught Pascal at school.

Education

[jd]

Pascal is one of the best educational programming languages out there. C is much more powerful, but is also much more lax - you can get away with really lousy coding and it often works. Ada is too cumbersome to have any practical educational value. COBOL should be taken away from academics, along with any sharp objects.

Pascal offers a good balance, forcing you to think about what you are doing, not merely how you are going to go about doing it. A lax style is often picked out by the compiler, and errors are often easier to see and correct.

The greatest advantage of Pascal, though, is that it is NOT used much in the workplace. This may seem odd, for something you're going to teach with, but think about it. It means that most people will be starting off fresh, rather than with bad habits, and means that you are learning about programming, rather than learning about some specific job. Jobs come and go, but software engineering will always be there.

Learning a skill for a specific job is only useful as long as that job is around. For example, if you learn Visual Basic today, you're market fodder if those jobs run dry by the .NET and C# rush that is going on. If you learn .NET and C#, you're dead in the water when the next rush comes along. You need to know what lies behind the skills, the generic stuff, because you can transfer those skills any time you like. A good coder can always pick up new languages. I know something like 20. But if you're locked into a language, you've got to learn anything new from scratch. You've nothing to build in.