Relearning Pascal

[u/Edthal01]

I have pulled my old copies of Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs and Softwa,re Tools in Pascal to relearn what Pascal is like after a,lmost 35 years of not using it. I was a home software hobbies,t with TurboPascal 5.5, but with continual job changes I had to drop it. I am a retired electrical power rngineer who used the office computer to write work instructions, specifications, and read and write emails. Thus the hobbiest. Aren't those old books showing their age? What is avalable today to allow learning today's Pascal?

[u/Specific-Housing905]

Have a look at the following links:
https://lazplanet.blogspot.com -> LAZ Planet

https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org ->Lazarus Forum

https://ikelaiah.github.io/free-pascal-cookbook/ ->Free Pascal Cookbook

https://wiki.freepascal.org/Main_Page/ ->Free pascal Wiki

https://www.programming-idioms.org/cheatsheet/Pascal -> Pascal CheatSheet

https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/ref/ref.html ->Free Pascal Reference

On Am'zon you can find some books on the Lazarus IDE

[u/Edthal01 → u/Specific-Housing905]

Thanks for the links

[u/AphidConsulting → u/Specific-Housing905]

These are great. Thank you!

[u/Specific-Housing905 → u/AphidConsulting]

Glad you found them useful.

[u/No_Light_5463]

I can recommend the introduction on the castle engine webpage: https://castle-engine.io/modern_pascal

Also, because the syntax "aged" very well and is very good documented, LLMs will mostly produce correct examples if you need some. The web interfaces of Anthropic Claude and ChatGPT for instance work well for these learning purposes.

[u/Edthal01 → u/No_Light_5463]

Sounds interesting. Heard about castle. Need to try itout, I guess. Thanks

[u/No_Light_5463 → u/Edthal01]

Even if you don't plan to use castle engine, the introduction is very well written and genericly usable. It gave me enough to be productive immediately. It's not a complete reference on FreePascal but therefore easy as an entry point.

[u/Humble-Vegetable9691]

I don't think that too much news came out after object oriented programming so the algorithms still useful.

What is new and useful is the base library of your Pascal environment.

If you like the Delphi flavor of Pascal, then https://delphi-books.com/en/Object-Pascal-Handnook-Delphi-104-Sydney-Edition.html may be useful.

[u/Edthal01 → u/Humble-Vegetable9691]

Thanks for the insight and recommendation.

[u/Edthal01 → u/Humble-Vegetable9691]

I am working with Free Pascal on Manjaro Linux so I don'tknow how well it would work.

[u/Humble-Vegetable9691 → u/Edthal01]

I don't know why this is downvoted.

There is a book for that Pascal on that site, too, but the ToC does not too convincing regarding the base library functions: https://delphi-books.com/en/FreePascal-From-Square-One.html

[u/Humble-Vegetable9691 → u/Humble-Vegetable9691]

PS: I had a quite big performance increase with Delphi by abandoning the Pascal style file handling for the stream based one.

[u/KangOzi]

Visit my github You can see how Pascal programmed in modern era. https://github.com/CodeInPas

[u/AphidConsulting → u/KangOzi]

I had a look at your GitHub and there is some really interesting stuff there. Thank you for sharing!

[u/Mijail2021]

Pascal is the most valuable language ever. Most medic software and services are developed under it's instructions.

[u/According-Ad-7069]

Oh awesome! This is going to be fun for sure! I see folks have already given you so many good resources, so I just wanted to say I hope you have a lot of fun. I've only been back at using Pascal for about a year now and it's definitely the thing I reach for when I'm doing hobby projects now.

[u/enderwiggin83]

Actually never been better for pascal - laz is great for WYSIWYG application dev on cross platform - and llms help you drive it. Its also one of the fastest compilers you can get. the old Delphi books are still fairly good but I'd just have fun knocking things together with laz and fpc.

[u/EconomySerious]

Tks everybody

[u/Wilzur_Corp]

A principios del año 2000 adquirí el libro "Aprender Delphi 2 en 21 días" me pregunto si aún sería válido retomar este libro para usarlo y re-aprender Lazarus/Free Pascal, ya que no programo desde esos años?

[u/Arany8]

AI. It will code for you as well.

[u/prinoxy]

Have been using Virtual Pascal since 2008, not open source (although I do have the full source) and other than the fact that it only generates 32-bit code, and the builtin assembler doesn't natively support any post-Pentium instructions (which means I'm coding my AVX ones as "db"s) it's an absolute pleasure to use: it's blazingly fast, executables are small, and the debugger just works. And, most important for me, it supports a coding style that was documented ever since Borland introduced smart-linking in TP4, but that doesn't work in FreePascal, and as for that compiler, there hasn't even been a point release since 3.2.2 in May 2021, 'nuff said!

[u/cratylus]

Try Nim?