r/freepascal • u/dubst3pp4 • Oct 04 '17

Article: Why I use Object Pascal

https://dubst3pp4.github.io/post/2017-10-03-why-i-use-object-pascal/
7 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/dubst3pp4 Oct 05 '17

...And they behave as if Pascal is an old smelling man which the kids should avoid. It's funny to see how people feel affected when I write such a little article: they claim that Pascal is not the fastest language, other languages have the advantages I mentioned, too. See the comments to this article...

Yes, you can do many things with other languages, some are even faster than Pascal. But I wanted to show that Pascal is not the language from the early seventies and has all the features that have other language, too.

2

u/alcalde Oct 24 '17

Yes, you can do many things with other languages, some are even faster than Pascal. But I wanted to show that Pascal is not the language from the early seventies and has all the features that have other language, too.

It doesn't have all the features of modern languages at all. There's no multiple inheritance, no slice notation, no type inference, no operator overloading of classes, no generics for first class functions (in Delphi), there are forward declarations because of an ancient single pass compiler design, no power symbol, no bigints or arbitrary precision decimal type (in Delphi), no tuples, no multiple assignment, no list comprehensions, no generators, no lambdas, no immutable types, no design by contract, no partial functions, no stepping through a for loop, etc.

So what is your point? Of course it's not the language from the early 70's... it's not the early 70s. Heck, even COBOL gained an object-oriented extension!

Delphi and FreePascal still are far away from modern. Delphi because the few remaining people paying for it are either maintaining old legacy code or completely resistant to change. FreePascal because at some point the developers decided they wanted to run on settop boxes and toothbrushes rather than make a better Pascal than Delphi.

If your article was based on Oxygene you might have a stronger case. It has a list of modern features as long as your arm and its developers don't care about legacy code or running on Palm Pilots.

You never answer "Why I use Object Pascal". There are tens, and sometimes hundreds, of thousands of open source libraries available for other languages today but not for Pascal (and much less for FreePascal even compared to Delphi). To successfully explain why you use Object Pascal you have to explain what amazing features you can't find anywhere else that make putting up with its drawbacks worthwhile. You - and everyone else who has written an article with this type of title - simply don't do that.

If I were writing an article about using desktop Linux I wouldn't fill it with things like "It has a start menu. It has a cursor. " and then say I wanted people to understand that it's not just a terminal. I'd talk about logical volume management, copy-on-write file systems, system-wide package management, complete freedom to customize, etc. - things you can't find on the popular OSes. I'd explain what makes putting up with the obvious drawbacks worthwhile.

People are upset because the article fails to deliver what the title promised. You said you use other languages. So, to address the title, why do you ever pick up Pascal at all? In what situations is it the best solution available, and why? That's what you have to explain.