Pascal?
 

Today at the Goodwill, I saw a turbo Pascal 7 book. I considered buying it, but I decided against it because I know nothing of Pascal. What is it and what is it good for?

I guess I know what it is, but what are your guys' personal experiences and uses for pascal and is it worth learing at all?

I'm maybe not the right to answer, but I'll try. I used it for about an year ago, but not that much, the syntax just isn't my style. All those := and no brackets, like I said, not my style. Except for the syntax I think it's a fine language, it's easy to use, fine tools and so on. I can't really say if there's something there isn't good, for like i said, I didn't use it that long. I programmed both GUI and Console, both easy to do. I, by myself, wouldn't recommend to learn the language. I would use a language like C, C++ or something familiar instead.

Pascal was actually used as a teaching language by universities when they cared about teaching the basic programming concepts rather than having people get bogged down in syntax --- because the syntax is relatively simple, if picky, and even minor violations (which are often a sign of programmer error) result in bitter complaints from the compiler, etc etc. Nowadays, it is relatively rare for universities to teach pascal as they now get onto bandwagons for latest and greatest languages. Personally, I consider that the quality of programmers has gone down overall as a result of that (not specifically because pascal is now rarely taught, but because a lot of software engineering courses now spend a lot more time learning syntax of a chosen language rather than basic design principles). Most people, when learning a new programming language, now devote most of their effort to learning syntax of the new language rather than techniques which the new language supports --- which is exactly the wrong thing to do.

If you're a beginner who is interested in learning the basic programming techniques, rather than worrying about syntax, then pascal is a good choice. If you just want to be able to throw together programs quickly, Pascal is not a good choice as it requires thought to program correctly (and effort to get the code past the compiler). This limits the utility of Pascal for large systems, and is why Pascal is less popular than some other languages for commercial use. Certainly, when I used Pascal (no, it wasn't my first language), the program eventually grew to the point where the effort of getting the syntax right for small changes exceeded the benefits of those changes --- or, to put it another way, once the program passed a certain size it became a pig to maintain. That said, some significant commercial developments were done with Pascal --- the majority of both applications and the operating systems themselves on early Apple Macintoshes were written in Pascal.

Notably, Pascal compilers are relatively simple to implement (certainly much simpler than compilers for other languages, such as C, C++, and Fortran) so it is easier to get the compiler correct.

There are a number of derivatives of Pascal which don't have all the weaknesses of Pascal, such as Modula-2 and Oberon. Borland's Delphi (for rapid application development, particularly with GUI) is an object-oriented derivative of Pascal --- and, notably, the first versions of Visual Basic were specifically designed by Microsoft to compete with Delphi. While the Ada programming language is not formally a Pascal derivative, both the language design and syntax are strongly influenced by Pascal.

Delphi is great for RAD- like VB, but better. That's where Pascal is most often used today, I believe.

i have an old data structures book published by bell labs !!after C!! that is based on pascal, it must be good for something!

Just a reminder, don't let anyone tell you that Pascal is useless. It is less useless than Visual Basic by far. What can Visual Basic do that Pascal can't? Actually, I should be saying, What can Pascal do that Visual Basic can't? The reason I decided to compare Pascal with Visual Basic is because syntax-wise, they are both pretty similar if you ask me. Language-wise, forgetting even about syntax similarities, VB and Pascal are pretty similar, at least in my opinion they are. Visual Basic has a RAD IDE that does support drag-and-drop technology. But, so does Pascal. If you're going to use Pascal you'd be crazy not to use FPC (FreePascal.org). There is a RAD IDE with drag-and-drop, called Lazarus. It works with FPC. FPC can run on many OS's and processor architectures, unlike VB that is limited to just Windows. Lazarus runs on many systems as well. I would love to be using Lazarus with FPC for my applications over VB, no matter what I need done.

Grumpy: Here here !!!! I second that. . . and third. . . and. . . well, you get the point.

Pascal was the first programming language I learned not more than 4 years ago. It was second semester in first year college and by the end of the semester I was convinced that it was good for everything.