Subj : Re: Opinion on Pascal
To   : Vk3jed
From : Sampsa
Date : Fri Nov 25 2016 02:18 am

-=> Vk3jed wrote to Sampsa <=-


 Sa> I personally don't like Pascal, the only reason it became such a big
 Sa> deal back in the 80s/early 90s was that it's REALLY easy to write a
 Sa> compiler for it.

 Sa> Also everything else about it is just kinda crappy, it's a language
 Sa> designed to teach comp sci students how to build a compiler, basically.

 Vk> Well, interesting bit of history, but can you be more specific, and
 Vk> what do you like in a language?

Well, I like most "modern" languages but at the moment my favourite is
definitely Python: It's VERY easy to pick up but scales to HUGE apps
if you want it, it's hard to state all the reasons WHY I like it but I
guess some of the main ones would be:

      - Nice, clean syntax (Python almost reads like pseudo-code)

      - Multi-paradigm (You can write basically imperitative code that
      looks like C/Pascal, heavily OOP-style code a la Java or even
      almost functional programming style stuff [of which I'm not a
      big fan])

      - Large, modular and uniform standard library (Python has more or
      less everything you can think of in the basic API, but you don't
      HAVE to know all of it to work with the language)

      - Popularity. Sounds stupid, but if an otherwise awesome language
      is used by 500 devs world-wide, you're not going to get a lot of
      new stuff up on GitHub to use. For example I think there are THREE
      different FTN processing libraries (admittedly all flawed) for
      Python.




 Sa> We did that exact exercise in year 3 of my CS degree, built a Pascal
 Sa> compiler for this hypothetical machine's CPU's assembler.

 Vk> I'm guessing that would be a fairly standard exercise for a CS student
 Vk> in their latter years.

Yeah, definitely, everyone who took a "real" CS course would have taken one
on compilers and the one a lot people end up implementing is Pascal - because
it's just so damn easy to implemnet a Pascal compiler.

And yeah, it was satisfying to see your for loop turn into a bunch of LOADs,
SAVEs and JUMPs. But I wouldn't have wanted to write that compiler in
Pascal :)



 Sa> Even Niklaus Wirt*h went on to produce two other languages that he
 Sa> considered the "real world" implementations of a Pascal-like language:
 Sa> Modula-2 and Oberon (Oberon is actually sort of nice to be honest but
 Sa> good luck doing anything with it).

 Vk> Modula-2 I have heard of, but not Oberon.

Oberon is quite cool - it's both a programming language and a whole desktop
UI, sort of like SmallTalk. I think it still boots in VMware..Have a look:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(operating_system)




 Vk> I never found it confusing, and TP had some neat tricks that could save
 Vk> a bit of code.  Now to find some time to relearn, I'd like to write
 Vk> some more modern Pascal code. :)

 Sa> TP wasn't confusing, but it sure as hell was unportable. Remember SWAG?

 Vk> No, I don't, actually.  But yes, I would agree somewhat unportable.

SWAG was awesome, you could find a TP unit in there to do basically
ANYTHING (it was like the CPAN [perl] or pip/distutils [Python] for TP)

Also, somewhat is somewhat of an understatement :)



 Sa> Pascal was never a good language, it was a "good enough" language in
 Sa> the 80s/90s with the Borland variants but I really hope it would just
 Sa> die a dignified death now.

 Vk> Well, it did what I wanted at the time. :)

Same here. But once I learned C I dropped it entirely and then in 1996
moved on to Java.

Now I code exclusively in Python (unless I have to do something weird
and platform specific, then I write a small C library and import it
into my Python app using ctypes).

Sampsa


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