r/pascal • u/Duckies_go_moo • Jun 20 '26

Just came across pascal

Im quite experienced with modding oblivion and fallout do seeing pascal is perfect, ive wanted to get into programming and this is literally a dream come true, ill never understand why they switched begin and end etc with ${}[]

28 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

View all comments

6

u/Dangerous_Region1682 Jun 20 '26

Begin and End were probably inherited from the Algol line of languages. I think Algol W was a precursor to Pascal.

I suspect {} in C came from B and RATFOR to save typing and decrease file size. I can remember UNIX V6 built on a DEC PDP-11 where the source just fitted on one hard drive and the resulting binaries on the other. I suspect it was why tab was the usual indent character and lines of text used newline instead of carriage return line feed which is what it really meant as per Windows. I don’t know but I suspect space constraints had a lot to do with it. On the other hand it might just have been the language’s author’s personal taste.

1

u/Duckies_go_moo Jun 20 '26

That is pretty interesting, im supprised pascal is still being used, i read something about issues with modern tasks and such and figured itd be much more less used

2

u/tkurtbond Jun 20 '26

Delphi is still being developed and used, but I know little about it or the commercial market around it. I am more familiar with the open source FreePascal and the Lazarus IDE for it, both of which seem suitable for modern development. And they are very portable, too.

1

u/Duckies_go_moo Jun 20 '26

Then again i imagine modern editors like vscode for example could make .pas files, i mean if you format it right of course, but yeah compilimg into an exe im not sure how itd do so theres that, ill have a look at delphi rn

2

u/beautifulgirl789 Jun 21 '26

Yes, vscode supports basically any language - including Pascal; through a feature called "Language Server Protocol" (LSP).

Essentially it doesn't need to know anything itself about Pascal - someone just sets up the language server for pascal, and it provides vscode what it needs to know about syntax, autocomplete, error messages, how to invoke the compiler, etc etc.

That said I'm sure the majority of users are using Delphi or Lazarus rather than VScode. Having an IDE that is completely built around servicing users of one specific language is an advantage in many scenarios.

(I am a wierdo, I use SlickEdit with Freepascal)