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Ask Slashdot: Is Pascal Underrated?
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on the D programming language, I was surprised to see criticisms of Pascal that were based on old information and outdated implementations.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?
Pascal is straight forward, something missing from most modern language which hide substantial implicit variations in how the language behaves by handing behind syntax like Perl or impossibly verbose statements like VB. I worked with Delphi professionally and still think fondly of it. Is a third-generation language, so is closer to system behavior, but is also a great teaching language which is sorely lacking from modern programming.
Here's to losing my Karma Bonus again....
One early problem with Pascal was fragmentation: while there were various decent, proprietary, dialects that let you actually write code that did stuff, *standard* Pascal was as much use as a chocolate teapot. Standard Pascal had lousy I/o and minimal libraries. the standard didn't even specify how to open a file, whereas C always had a decent subset of the Unix API as part of the de-facto K&R standard.
Had Pascal come a few years later when the IBM PC had crushed all before it, then something like Turbo Pascal might have been far more successful. However, back when there was more than one type of PC to worry about, C's huge standard library, and it's preprocessor for fixing minor dialect issues made it unbeatable for writing portable code.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I used Pascal in some college courses, and felt that my productivity went down by about 50% compared to C, just because of all the extra typing, and the reduced readability: begin using words for punctuation does not work as well as using punctuation for punctuation end
You felt Pascal was less readable than C ?
My university actually taught/used Pascal in the classroom in the early/mid 1980s and I graded programs written in it. Kernighan's criticisms of Pascal on BSD are spot on - I know, I tried using it for a (more) serious project. The semester project for my Operating Systems class was to simulate an interactive operating system - in Pascal.
The system used for the class was the University's IBM 4381 mainframe running MUSIC ("McGill University System for Interactive Computing") and the version of Pascal had *lots* of libraries and features.
I was a undergraduate research assistant (working on an AI project, funded by NASA, in LISP and Prolog) and had an account on the VAX-785 running 4.3BSD and wanted to use *that* (on my schedule) instead of standing in line to use the IBM. My instructor said "sure", but I'd have to port the support libraries he wrote for the assignment. Unfortunately, the version of Pascal on BSD was just the basic language - as specified in the Language Definition book by Jensen and Wirth. Porting the code from the "richer" version of Pascal on the IBM/MUSIC to the "basic" version on VAX/BSD was simply not possible.
So, I asked my instructor if I could, instead, do the semester project in C. He said "sure", but, again, I'd have to port his libraries from Pascal to C. Now... I didn't know C at the time, but porting his code to it and doing my semester project in it was a great introduction - and I passed the class. All-in-all, this experience help me out immensely with my CS career as I do a LOT of cross-platform work in many programming languages - though not Pascal :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I worked on an industrial project that consisted of a couple of million (with an "M") lines of Pascal. We used IBM's Pascal/VS dialect. Pascal/VS had extensions that made it very, very close to Modula-2. We used Pascal because it was portable (across IBM platforms) and strongly-typed. At the time, it was the only strongly-typed language available to us. Our error rate (bugs reported by customers) was incredibly low, because it was really hard to make many of the screw-ups that were then common in PL/1, Fortran, and c. We ended up with a system that ran across IBM's product line (mainframes, workstations, PC's).
As Pascal aged (we could see that support would be ending), we moved to C++ by converting the entire code base into a subset of C++ (using a software package we purchased and thousands of lines of AWK and sed). We used C++ as a "strongly typed subset" of "c" for about 10 years, before we started converting to objects and methods.
That project started in the 80's and is only now (almost 30 years later) being rolled up and decommissioned. The original architecture was very structured, streamlined, and simple; with an incredible amount of effort going into defining data structures (as befit the restrictions of Pascal, like no dynamic arrays). It held up very, very well. Still blows the doors off its competition in performance, but the company is getting out of development and support, and needs something it can buy (even if it's slower and has less function.)
40 is old for a software developer. Someone who is 40 today entered college just as web browsers were being invented. You could not just connect the dots on library calls to put together an application then. Now you can.
I have a strong sense of wanting to know how things work that comes from having built a lot of software in the 80's and 90's, when you had to know the internals to make progress. That is downright counterproductive in web development now. By the time you learn enough to understand how a library works, the developer who just learned enough to use it already shipped their code. That's the sort of disconnect between age ranges at work now.
. What can you do in Pascal that you can't do in C++, or Python, or Java?
So the world only needs 3 languages? Everything from Lua to OjectiveC to Javascript to Haskell... we already have C++, Python, and Java.
And frankly that's an odd 3 to choose. Why Python? Why not Javascript? Why not Lisp?
Maybe we just need Pascal, Lisp, and C#.
"all the extra typing"? I don't even know what to say to that. 99% of programming, is design and debugging. 1% is the actual "typing out the code". If you lost 50% of your time to typing out the code due to typing out begin and and I've got serious concerns about the design.
and reduced readability
begin
Formatting, indentation, and syntax highlighting make using being and end work just fine as block markerers.
end
Plus I admit I hate python's semantic white space. At least begin and end don't get mangled simply by copy and pasting a snippet. And since all the semantic information is in the content, the IDE can do the pretty formatting FOR YOU to improve readability.