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by networked 4532 days ago
What you're saying rings true to me. I also learned Borland/Turbo/Object Pascal first (perhaps somewhat unusually, I went from Borland Pascal to C++ to Delphi when learning to program as a kid). Although I can't say I never liked C there are many things about Object Pascal I found superior that I miss in C, especially the built-in string type (for those who haven't used it, in C-land it can be compared to bstrings but it's handled completely transparently).

If you wanted to use Object Pascal today and not have to rely on Embarcadero for the continued support of your tools you could use Free Pascal and Lazarus, which are both free software (GPL-licensed). Unfortunately, there's bit of a stigma against using any variant of Pascal these days (to which, no doubt, the many crappy CRUD apps written in Delphi and Borland's management of their product have both contributed), so it's not a good choice for new projects, especially free and open source. I wonder if Nimrod could be the comeback of type-safe compiled languages that don't target the JVM.
2 comments
lobster_johnson 4532 days ago
Nimrod does indeed look very much inspired by Object Pascal (it even uses the classic Borland "T" and "P" prefixes for types and pointers, respectively, something I honestly never liked).

Object Pascal was a fine language, but I don't see the point of using it today, not without removing a lot of the historical Pascal warts (begin/end, the weird semicolon rules, somewhat poor integration with C, etc.), and then you pretty much end up with Java.

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pjmlp 4532 days ago
Actualy C# I would say. ;)
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lobster_johnson 4532 days ago
Indeed! C# seems like the bastard child of Java and Delphi.

To be honest, I don't think I could ever go back to a language where method names started with an upper case letter. What were we thinking!

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pjmlp 4532 days ago
> Unfortunately, there's bit of a stigma against using any variant of Pascal these days

Ada seems to be only one really surviving, but it has a niche in only in areas where security and human lifes have priority over frames per second.

> I wonder if Nimrod could be the comeback of type-safe compiled languages that don't target the JVM.

I have been looking at it lately, but it seems to be a one man show, right?

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