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Ask Slashdot: Is Pascal Underrated?

Posted by timothy on from the let's-make-a-wager dept.

An anonymous reader writes In the recent Slashdot discussion on the D programming language, I was surprised to see criticisms of Pascal that were based on old information and outdated implementations. While I'm sure that, for example, Brian Kernighan's criticisms of Pascal were valid in 1981, things have moved on since then. Current Object Pascal largely addresses Kernighan's critique and also includes language features such as anonymous methods, reflection and attributes, class helpers, generics and more (see also Marco Cantu's recent Object Pascal presentation). Cross-platform development is fairly straightforward with Pascal. Delphi targets Windows, OS X, iOS and Android. Free Pascal targets many operating systems and architectures and Lazarus provides a Delphi-like IDE for Free Pascal. So what do you think? Is Pascal underrated?

6 of 492 comments (clear)

  1. Modula-3 FTW! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    begin
    Pascal should die!
    end

    1. Re:Modula-3 FTW! by halivar · · Score: 4, Funny

      It's ok! I got you covered! Wait... crap!

    2. Re:Modula-3 FTW! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      For a beginner, curly braces may seem more readable. For an experienced programmer, Python wins. Curly braces lead to ambiguous interpretation, whereas indentation guarantees a single interpretation and stands out well.

    3. Re:Modula-3 FTW! by lucm · · Score: 4, Funny

      when I try making heads and tails of curly brackets I fall flat on my face.

      Just think of them as melting square brackets.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    4. Re:Modula-3 FTW! by Lemmeoutada+Collecti · · Score: 1, Funny

      Inc? Include i? Increase i? Incest i?

      --

      You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
  2. Re:Discussion is outdated by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 3, Funny

    The issue is that most of the time people doing this work are on the hardware teams, rather than the software teams. It's a hard world to live in, to be sure, the silicon & pcb guys think you're software (i.e. you write code that executes ON a processor, not code that creates the processor). The software guys don't speak the same language: they're hung up on methodologies, APIs, code style & the business of software, or else are more heavy in to the software research side of pure algoritms. It can be tough to fit in, but the job has to be done, it isn't any less essential, just a bit more niche.