![]() Personally, I liked the simplifications Wirth did with its Oberon language. ![]() Not saying that it's a horrible language, after all, a lot of people used COBOL or MUMPS, too, but you don't see that many open source projects trying to revive them. History, not language merit is the main driving force why Pascal still enjoys some popularity. Wirth languages in general seem to be quite popular there, as not too long ago I knew some people who had their Programming 101 courses in Oberon… Pascal was always big there, and today some schools still teach with it. The majority of current Pascal users seem to come from three backgrounds: People who remember Turbo Pascal fondly (plus a small group of MacPascal users), the aforementioned Delphi fanboys and educational users. Get Visual Studio 5(ish) and code a MFC app in C++ that does basic database CRUD, then do the same with Delphi. Delphi especially had a very ardent fanbase, and really was something back in the days. Pascal is historically quite entrenched and never went away. Sometimes one gets a bit left behind until a killer feature or app revives interest (Rails was a big boost for Ruby, Moose brought some people back to Perl etc.). Why does a language need to be "better"? Python, Ruby and Perl basically cover the same domain, and all of them thrive. If you are used to the handholding level of documentation that goes with C#, you should be prepared for early balding because of the unhealthy amount headscratching you will be doing when you try to do something out of the ordinary in Delphi. Keeping in mind that it is an open source development tool you can't really complain. There the situation generally lies somewhere between bad and attrocious.įree Pascal and Lazarus's Documentation is decent, I guess. Then there are the other products in the RAD Studio collection. The core Delphi product is fairly well documented by now, but if you go down one of the side roads of the framework you will be hard pressed to find proper documentation. The biggest issue of all is, as it has been for a long time now, lack of proper documentation. On the other hand the database components that delphi has are actually quite good and making database driven apps is one of the things that drove Delphi adoption back in the Borland days. One big feature in C# is LINQ and Delphi is very much missing such a feature. You can only have one event delegate in Delphi, since they are just procedure references, no multicasting. There are no lambda expressions, although anonymous functions are available. ![]() Templates do not work properly and have less features. Delphi has more language features than Free Pascal, but both are a far bit behind C#. I will comment on Delphi mainly, but some of the issues reflect onto Free Pascal as well. I program in Delphi for my regular job and have followed Free Pascal / Lazarus losely. It's not terribly likely because all of the freePascal enthusiasts (myself included) have large volumes of code dependent on the old std libs. It would essentially be an entirely new thing. What I would like to see is a clean fork of Free Pascal keeping the language but building a new RTL. That means you have TList, TFPList and TFPGlist. Because generics came later the generic supporting parts of the std lib are a supplement rather than part of the core. Because of Delphi compatibility many of the obvious names for classes provide the Delphi compatible equivalents. It is more than capable, having served real world usage for many years, but it is also dated. Function overloading etc.įor me the weak point is the std lib. There are all the mod cons, Operator overloading, for. In those respects it gives you both a high degree of control and high degree of responsibility. ![]() You instantiate an object by calling its constructor. There are no implied object creation mechanisms. It has had Object Orientation for many years. So you only get generic behaviour when you specifically ask for it. If have a Generic DataMap you can make a map of bytes by ByteMap = specialize Datamap(Byte) It has generics, but doesn't do them blindly. I'm not overly familiar with C# so I can't really compare against it specifically but FreePascal has gained some decent features over the years.
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