tempforever said on Wed, 29 May 2024 09:35:24 -0400

>onefang wrote:
>> The Rust hype reminds me of the Ruby hype. They even share the
>> first half of the spelling.
>:-) Ha!  It's funny because it's true
>
>>
>> Given my history I consider my self justified in being a computer
>> language bigot. I hate any that start with the letter P
>One of the languages I learned early in my life was Pascal; I've not
>used it in forever, but don't really recall any hatred toward it,
>myself.  I was rather young to programming at the time, though.  I
>wonder what it would feel like now to use it...

Like you, Pascal was one of my early languages (1983). Pascal is a
wonderful application language, and Turbo Pascal let you *mindfully*
access bits and bytes to do DOS stuff that required specific memory
access. It seems to me to be a simplified Ada. I hated the fact that C
won and Turbo Pascal lost.

Unfortunately, today's Free Pascal is an overblown superset of either
Niklaus Wirth Pascal or Turbo Pascal, and suffers from the "must
memorize every tool" problem. I can understand this though, because
Pascal is the glue language of the Lazarus Rapid Application
Development (RAD) system (Free Software Delphi workalike). The
1990's gave us numerous RADs that could whip out an application in a
day or two, but somehow they all either died or got four figure price
tags. Lazarus is the last RAD standing.

There's a switch you can flip on Free Pascal to restrict it to Turbo
Pascal 5.5. This is fantastic.

SteveT

Steve Litt

Autumn 2023 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21