Why Pascal Is Not My Favorite Programming Language (1981)
lysator.liu.se
lysator.liu.se
If you don't know modern Pascal then check out Free Pascal, Lazarus, and Delphi:
https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi
(And Delphi documentation at http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/ )
http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/20693
It was the fastest compiler and environment of the time, but additionally, even before 1983, the "minimal" form of the language, suitable for teaching, was almost never used in production. What was used in production did have the necessary extensions which allowed having some very good software, with provably less bugs than C, because the basis was good and safer.
See also MacPaint, developed also around 1983 ("finished in October 1983"), in Apple Pascal:
https://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw...
Even Go language took its influences from Pascal, "rediscovering" some aspects that were obviously better (for the humans writing programs) than C.
Since I first came across Go I've been thinking that a Go-based Delphi clone would be really amazing. Maybe someone could breathe some new life into the Lazarus IDE by adding support for Go? Hmmm, actually there already is something: https://github.com/ying32/govcl - probably worth keeping an eye on...
How many of these extensions are in ISO Pascal, though?
ISO Pascal was last updated in 1990 (ISO 7185:1990); there is evidently an ISO/IEC 10206:1991, a standard for "Extended Pascal". This Extended Pascal 1991 standard was evidently reviewed in 2008 and affirmed as-is.
FreePascal has a Wiki page about Extended Pascal:
http://wiki.freepascal.org/Extended_Pascal
I see a lot of "(not yet implemented)".
- 2.0 Types and scopes: Apple = type Integer; makes it a distinct type
- 2.1 Array size: dynamic arrays
- 2.2 Admittedly, not exactly solved, but classes are how we hide variable these days.
- 2.3 Oxygene doesn't care about order of things
- 2.4: Long solved
- 2.5: While allowed; something can be said for using an alias here to make the intent obvious; the in set is also solved in Oxygene since c in ['a'..z'] compiles to c >='a' and c <='z'.
- 3: boolean shortcircuitry has long been part of Pascal
- 4: With streams apis this is no longer a thing
- 5: xor/or has lng been part of the languages, the semicolon issue seems a style issue to me, not a big deal
(edit: had to insert enters to make it readable)
The main problem I remember is that you cannot simply use pointer types, or other complex types, as function parameters. You always have to declare a typedef first, such that the type that is used in the function signature is a single word (named reference to the typedef).
Working on a compiler myself, I understand from an implementation perspective why Wirth did this, but this is really lazy. From a developer's perspective, to me that's next to unusable. It's really stressful to predeclare pointer types before using them, and using names like TypeP, TypePP and so on is much less readable than simple ^Type, ^^Type, etc.
Another thing that's driving me crazy is case insensitivity. I would never willfully choose a language with case insensitive identifiers. It's driving me nuts.
> 2.2 Admittedly, not exactly solved, but classes are how we hide variable these days.
global initialized variables are really important to me to avoid unnecessary boilerplate and indirection (which is just as painful as not having initialized globals). What I did was initialize them in the initilization section. But it was another major inconvenience.
What about it annoys you? Do you often define a lot of variables whose names differ only by case, in languages that let you? Common Lisp normally behaves as though it were case insensitive, and I've never found that to be a pain point.
however my view is jaded by working mostly on minis and our languages were always this way. the focus was on concise naming and logic and to me just adding another method for a typo to nail me does not benefit a language.
so can someone tell me the reason why?
What really irks me is that in case-insensitive languages, codebases naturally start to use all kinds of variations of casing, to refer to the same variable. It really trips me up when reading code. It's also difficult when writing code since I tend to remember variable names in a very visual way. (Same reason why I dislike the case-insensitive Windows filesystems).
There simply isn't any good reason not to always use the same case for any variable throughout a project.
Beyond that it's also aesthetically not pleasing, from an engineering viewpoint. Case-insensitive comparison is much more complicated than simply comparing strings as arrays of bytes.
Historically, I think the reason why case-insensitive languages exist is simply that at the time they were invented (at least in the case of Pascal), many systems couldn't input lowercase characters.
The Pascal way would be to use the "T" convention for the name of the type. So "thing : TThing".
Maybe people who somehow don't differentiate between 'T' and 't', and are not visually remembering persons, don't have this problem. But for me, and for computers, they are different characters.
There's no reason that types and variables need to live in the same namespace. The language can know what it's expecting at a certain point. Putting them in different namespaces, like Lisp does, lets you re-use the same name for types and variables even with matching case, and is more waterproof with regards to clashes than a case convention.
> There simply isn't any good reason not to always use the same case for any variable throughout a project.
I agree, but I also feel that there isn't any good reason to have multiple distinct objects in the same namespace whose names differ only by case. It just seems like a recipe for confusion.
When I'm quickly iterating on something, it's nice being able to be lazy and inconsistent with capitalisation. Standardising that in a codebase is important, but it's more of a job for a linter, I think.
And as soon as we go to more dynamic languages, where types can also be variables, it all breaks down.
You should almost never use it in programming, unless you mean it. I've never written Common Lisp code in upper case, other than copying and pasting from REPL output.
Allowing upper case to simply denote lower case any time you want basically PANDERS TO THE MORONS WHO SHOUT LIKE THIS in internet forums.
Supporting case insensitivity in a modern setting requires carrying a large table of Unicode data about all of the world's scripts that exhibit case.
Which scripts exhibit case is controversial. Are Japanese hiragana and katakana in a case relationship? Should れつ (retsu) and レツ (RETSU, sort of) be the same symbol or not?
Programmers used to case distinctions see FOO, Foo and foo as completely different; there is no issue there. Literate non-programmers should also see them as different. "Pat" is a name, "pat" is a verb.
Mathematics uses case distinction. If you're writing a summation notation with Σ, you can't just switch to σ. You can't switch 3 + 4i to 3 + 4I just because you feel like it.
Basically, case insensitivity is for illiterate morons with no background in mathematics.
Why it appears in classical programming languages is because 1950's and 1960's hardware didn't support large enough character sets to have both upper and lower case. Even some consumer grade microcomputers in the late 1970's and early 1980's lacked lower case, like Apple II's.
The Unix TTY system still supports folding to upper case!
Try this at your Linux bash prompt:
$ stty olcuc # output: lower case to upper case
Thus, old programming languages were written in upper case, but with increasing support for lower case in character sets and hardware, programmers wanted to use those same languages in lower case. A pragmatic solution was to support it both ways: allow lower case for new programs, but also upper case for backward compatibility with existing code.
So it wasn't illiteracy; there was a technical reason. The technical reason doesn't exist any more, and so repeating this in new designs is just illiteracy. If you're making a new language today, you have no existing code in upper case that has to work.
Depending on what you're doing exactly there are things you can do to mitigate that. If you're using records, you can just pass the record by reference instead. If you're using objects then you don't often need separate pointer types to them (the object reference is a pointer itself). If it makes sense for what you're doing you can also use untyped parameters:
http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Rio/en/Parameters_(...
If you don't need to actually deference the pointers you can use the Pointer type (and if you still need to get at the data in some circumstances you can cast to a typed pointer inside the function):
http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Rio/en/Pointers_and...
Why? Passing a record by reference looks like this: procedure SomeProc(var AMyRec : TMyRecord);
Passing an object reference looks like this: procedure SomeProc(const AMyObj : TMyObject);
I don't see that these are somehow onerous or hiding anything.
Add to that the unfounded non-orthogonality (like in C++, references are technically the same as pointers, but not syntactically, and not in the type system, leading to combinatorial explosion. And of course the bloated standard library is proof).
Furthermore this approach doesn't work for pointers that point to arrays. Again, Delphi has its own zoo of workarounds that OOP enthusiast will think are so much better -- from dynamic arrays (really weird interactions with reallocations combined with "var" modifier or not), to ObjectLists (not typed) to a version of generics (has its own technical problems). But what I want is the simple and obvious thing (pointer parameters without typedefs) and there's no good reason why we shouldn't have it.
There is no ambiguity and nothing is hidden. Both examples are passing a reference to the procedure and all Pascal programmers will know what it means.
I think your argument boils down to a lack of experience with Pascal (which is fine). But these things you think are problems simply aren't.
If you run into name collisions between FooBar and fooBar due to case insensitivity, isn't that indicative of your naming scheme for variables and functions, rather than a fault in the language design?
However, the language problem I see is when I define something as FooBar and reference it as FoOBAr or FOOBAR and that is not a symbol-not-found error.
Case insensitive, our compiler by default warns about mismatches between definition and use.
Initialization is there, what I meant is that we don't have something where you define a static var inside a method body. You can of course make it implementation only or private which can severely limit the scope of what can access it.
You can use a const in a function and wrap it in {$J+} to allow modifying consts. And that's a static variable on that function (or procedure), e.g.
{$J+}
procedure A; const C: integer = 0; begin Inc(C); Writeln(C); end;
{$J-}
Anyway, I've always found your particular products/business interesting. Could you please share some insights? Like who are your userbase (I believe you're in a very niche space, but I might be wrong), how strong are sales going on, etc...
Our users come from all ranges, both in terms of company size (from single-dev shops to big-name Fortune 500s) and target area (mobile, desktop, web, services, enterprise, you name it). Elements is a general purpose programming environment, and I believe there's something to find and like about it for just about every software developer.
For example, while we have a strong focus on sharing code across platforms, the product is nit just about that, a lot of developers single-platform devs still love Elements for other reasons, even if they only care about, say, .NET, or only about Cooca. The multi-platform support is just one of a list of many benefits any individual dev might be attracted to (or not care about).
—marc
What does that (partial) sentence mean?
Your Oxygene compiler (which is called Delphi) as well as “FPC” have both solved all of these issues ages ago?
That seems wrong because Delphi is a Pascal descendent. But otherwise I don’t know how to parse that partial sentence.
What are Oxygene and FPC?
As for Pascal, TurboPascal has been revolutionary, and it came out in 1983, two years after this article came out. TP, the lightning-speed IDE, debugger and compiler in one small executable pushed Pascal to its peak popularity; Delphi was another revolution.
These days, Lazarus would be the go-to modern Pascal successor. (Delphi is still here, but is very much non-free; Lazarus is FOSS).
Most obviously Modula-2 is is case-sensitive, while (Turbo)Pascal is not. Also Modula-2 addresses the danging-else problem in Pascal, while TurboPascal does not.
It wouldn't surprise me if TurboPascal addressed some of the same deficiencies in Pascal that Wirth also addressed in Modula-2, but they probably do so differently.
If you've experienced 100MB Electron garbage and are tired of it, or you think C++ is a tangled mess and want no part in it, and you need something LGPL that has a wonderful community, check it out.
http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Rio/en/System.Gener...
It's a shame more people don't use Object Pascal. I like it a lot.
(Of course, Go's succession goes not directly from Pascal, but through Modula-2 and Oberon.)
For example you can't make a generic function that uses the + operator to add two parameterized elements together, because there's no way to constrain the types to only those which has the + operator defined. But unlike templates in C++, the compiler doesn't just try and see if it works but rather emits an error.
And I feel this was so wrong and that the world could be a better place if we would have turned into another direction.
Back until the dawn of computing. And the dawn of technology before that. And the dawn of humankind before that. And so on.
https://www.getlazarus.org/new/
https://www.getlazarus.org/learn/language/lexical/
... and the searchable online reference: