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Yeah, but it's not hip, and it's too wordy with BEGIN/END, and the data structures are too restrictive, and the compiler nags you, and the like. And you can write an 8M line codebase in it, touched in all kinds of foul ways, and it still works. That's the biggest codebase I've ever worked on at least. Take that as a small (subjective) clue. Anything that is great about Rust or Nim or <..> could also have extended Pascal or M2 for the same result, and much sooner. Especially goes for M2, because the grammar was so small, thus avoiding the old PL1 traps from an overloaded parser. FPC needs smart macros, needs to backport M2 interfaces, and the solid green thread spec* backported from M2, but it really is in the ballpark. You want gc? Well, fair enough, but you can write a pretty good mark/release* facsimile with RTTI. Or how about Eiffel simulated contracts with open arrays? And Lazarus, good grief what a 30 year old premiere open source project. No point in even talking about how awesome it is. Co-Pascal has been doing co-routines for 45 years. In turbo pascal, you could create mini-heaps that could be dumped most anytime. They weren't smart, but still a cool feature. |
Macros would be a horrible thing to add to Lazarus/Free Pascal, in my opinion. They would make the reader have to second guess everything they see. Also, it would likely slow down things by not allowing single pass compilation any more.
>Co-Pascal has been doing co-routines for 45 years.
I wrote a Turbo Pascal implementation of co-routines back in 1987[1], although I'm just learning of that term now. I was frankly amazed at how simple it was to get working, though I did surprise myself the first time fork returned twice, and I was confused as to why it did ;-)
[1] https://www.pcorner.com/list/PASCAL/TASKER4.ZIP/TASKER.PAS/