I loved Pascal instantly because my first language was mainframe APL, followed by some weird in-house macroassembler that Xerox was using on its 8080-based business boxes. Compared to APL, Pascal is not only elegant but transcendent. Verbosity bothers me not at all (I used to write COBOL too) because I like being able to read and understand what I've written six months after I set it aside. You couldn't do that with APL, and I had a lot of trouble doing it with C.

As a few other people here mentioned, I'm creating a FreePascal edition of my ancient Turbo Pascal book, ripping out stuff that nobody needs anymore, like CGA graphics and TurboVision. (I believe that there's a Turbo Vision clone available for FreePascal, but I just can't force myself to learn it again and write about it, even though I was writing paying apps with it in 1993.) The book is free, and the current version (I tinker with it irregularly) can be found here:

http://www.copperwood.com/pub/FreePascalSquareOne--08-06-201...

I'm going to stop building the release date into the filename with the next release; just search for "FreePascal SquareOne.pdf".

I'm programming almost exclusively in Lazarus these days, a lot of it for the Raspberry Pi. At some point I'd like to write a couple of shortish books on specific Lazarus topics like databases, and once we get settled in Phoenix I'll give it a try.

BTW, my friend erbo told me about this thread, so I figured I'd stop in and say hi.

--73--

Jeff Duntemann K7JPD