[tangentstorm]

In some ways, pascal had such an impact that many of its revolutionary ideas (structured programming) are now so commonplace as to be unremarkable.

The way primitive sets and enumerated types fit together is still a rarity, as far as I know. (You can accomplish the same things in any low-level language, but the pascal syntax make it really nice.)

Interfaces in pascal are fairly interesting because they allow you to implement your own addref/decref routines for automatic reference counting. This was made for COM, but you can plug it into whatever reference counting scheme you like (say if you want to write python extensions or whatever).

The main thing is still probably the component system though, and the tight integration with the development environment.

It's kind of a trip the first time you configure an IDE plugin and realize it just recompiled the whole IDE for you.

[benibela]

>Interfaces in pascal are fairly interesting because they allow you to implement your own addref/decref routines for automatic reference counting. This was made for COM, but you can plug it into whatever reference counting scheme you like (say if you want to write python extensions or whatever).

Free Pascal now has a new way for that, stack objects/record with custom init/cleanup code. Real RAII. But not if used with inheritance