30th Anniversary of Pascal 587
GrokSoup writes "UC San Diego is holding a public symposium on Friday, October 22nd, honoring the 30th anniversary of the Pascal programming language. Oh the memories of undergraduate bubble-sorts ..."
A list is only as strong as its weakest link. -- Don Knuth
More serious apps... (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.
Re:Started with QBasic (Score:5, Informative)
Why Pascal is not always my favourite language (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What do they teach in undergrad now? (Score:3, Informative)
Some wackos at places like UT Dallas try to teach freshman about Java classes, but they'll learn that's not the right approach.
Re:More serious apps... (Score:5, Informative)
Borland... (Score:3, Informative)
There is a ton of third party support [torry.net] for it and you can do just about everything a little easier then just about everything else. All my DSOs for Apache are done in Kylix...
Niklaus Wirth's languages (Score:5, Informative)
Rather than quick coding by the seat of your pants which C encourages or at least strongly tolerates.
Re:Why didn't it succeed? (Score:3, Informative)
The problem with Pascal, was that it wasn't cross platform with other operating systems (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, whatever...). And it didn't have access to the windowing/networking libraries that C programs had on UNIX (It wasn't until 1993 that Microsoft starting including TCP/IP with PC's).
Accessing any other libraries on the PC required 'C' bindings to be defined anyway, which of course required pointers to be handled).
Any Pascal programs for the PC were also hobbled by the 16-bit memory segment boundary limit, which
caused many problems for applications with large amounts of data.
Re:New Record (Score:1, Informative)
Trolls spout gibberish, insults, profanity, and sexually explicit material in order to get you to reply. They just want attention, so it's best not to give them any. Usually, people posting as Anonymous Coward are trolls.
Re:Why didn't it succeed? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More serious apps... (Score:5, Informative)
LISP at MIT (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Niklaus Wirth's languages (Score:3, Informative)
I've actually written two commercial applications in Modula-2. Did you know that MetroWerk's CodeWarrior is actually a descendent of their original product (and company name) that was then known as MetCom Modula-2? I still have those books in a box. First language I actually coded in for the Mac. That was in 88.
Re:More serious apps... (Score:5, Informative)
and Basic too (Score:3, Informative)
THere is a discussion above about production languages vs teaching languages being taught at this time. My opinion being better a production language, because when the Business Admin types take their intor to programmig class they will not be left with the impression that a teaching language is a real programming language.
THen force programmers to deal with what often amounts to crippleware when they are tasked with managing a software project.
And it's easy to implement (Score:3, Informative)
I strongly recommend Jack Crenshaw's (free) introduction. [iecc.com]
I seem to remember that the compiler is written in Pascal. I translated it to C as a I went along. You could always use GNU Pascal [google.com] (That's a google link, because the site seems to be refusing connections. Could that be related to this FPP?)
Re:Bah! (Score:3, Informative)
Writing numerical code in octal - I just can't begin to imagine how much talent that took.
Re:More serious apps... (Score:5, Informative)
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
Free Pascal (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Raskin's Pascal poster (Score:3, Informative)
Agreed, but for Pascal you won't run into any constructs that are recognized by the same chunk of "Railroad Normal Form" but which have radically different semantics--over and above the usual things you can't capture in a context-free grammar.
That is, Pascal doesn't have C++'s "if you can interpret it as a declaration, it's a declaration" rule.
From what I've read, C++ has the same difficulty as the original FORTRAN did; the original parser was ad hoc, so that it was a nightmare to parse with reasonable techniques, and arguably therefore harder for humans to deal with.
Re:Pascal... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What do they teach in undergrad now? (Score:3, Informative)
FREE PASCAL! (Score:3, Informative)
Both apps are Free Software (GPL).
www.lazarus.org [freepascal.org]
www.freepascal.org [freepascal.org]
Lazarus := Delphi-like (almost a clon) IDE for Win32 AND Linux. It's API independent: can use transparently GTK+, Windows graphic system... etc.
FreePascal :=
Portable? no problem! It's available for different processors Intel x86, Motorola 680x0 (1.0.x only) and PowerPC (from 1.9.2).
The following operating systems are supported: Win32, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, MacOSX/Darwin, MacOS classic, DOS, OS/2, BeOS, SunOS (Solaris), QNX and Classic Amiga.
The language syntax is semantically compatible with TP 7.0 as well as most versions of Delphi (classes, rtti, exceptions, ansistrings). Furthermore Free Pascal supports function overloading, operator overloading and other such features.
Try it! Or, at least visit the web sites.
Re:Borland... (Score:3, Informative)
I still find it very cool and useful, and I am still using Delphi 7 for Win32. I have avoided Delphi 8 because it was only
Re:Why didn't it succeed? (Score:5, Informative)
But you are quite right, compilers where the reason. C.A.R.Hoare (of quicksort and CSP fame) tells a good story where early in his career he led an Algol compiler team into disaster - after two years of careful programming they produced a multi-pass compiler and when they first tested it, it managed to correctly translate 1 line of Algol per second!
Brad Templeton's ALICE rules! (Score:1, Informative)
Ada lives on, kinda (Score:3, Informative)
Although calling Ada a success would be pushing it, it seems my companies large projects work best in ada, then c and c++ is always a disaster.
Ada lacks a lot of libraries that make java/ c so useful. But as someone pointed out (with a chuckle), you can bind Ada calls to C making it as powerful as C!
Re:More serious apps... (Score:3, Informative)
And remember, TeX is still written in Pascal.
Re:More serious apps... (Score:3, Informative)
The difference is that the one has constanct time appends and inserts (the linked list) while the other one has constant time indexed lookup (the Arraylist). Both are needed because the access patterns of the collection cannot be predetermined by the API.
The naming convention used is quite logical if you bother to look further.
The same naming convention also goes for the other collections in the API, such as Set (HashSet
Chrome (Score:2, Informative)