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Comment by unnouinceput | Hacker News Reader

"..remade Turbo Pascal..." - translation: C#. Yup, that's right, C# is a clone of Delphi and then some.

Anyone knowing Pascal will have no problem jumping to C# because it will swim in familiar waters, only difference is that being a Microsoft product has C style syntax.

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Well you have said what I always think. For those familiar C# feels like the next iteration of Delphi, but with curly braces. Both Delphi and Free Pascal haven't stopped though. They've added generics, extension methods, attributes, and many of the other features that have also been added onto C#.

Free Pascal has gone further to add management operators, vector math intrinsics, and improved array features.

> with curly braces

...and .NET in tow.

Yeah, FPC can target an absurd collection of systems; can C# handle that level of portability?

Only in the same way as Java can (run the .NET VM) and the GUI story is far less clear.

Early .NET also copied liberally from VCL. The entire System.Windows.Forms namespace, with base classes like Component and Control, feels very familiar to anybody who made GUI apps in Delphi before.

Delphi has those too, and with latest iteration (read May 2020) they added inline variable declaration (which on Free Pascal will raise a syntax error)

Note that inline variable declaration had been discussed at the past by the Free Pascal developers and was rejected by most of them - this is a (rare) case where they decided that they wont follow Delphi. Reasons, IIRC, are mainly due to how weird the syntax is and it feels too un-Pascal-ish to have mixed declarations and code (in Pascal pretty much everything is declared in its own section) and with Pascal supporting nested functions/procedures and the IDE being able to autocomplete variable declarations for you, it is more of a code smell than something necessary.

From what I've read/understood, the reason Delphi folks decided to do this is to allow even better compiler optimization. This way it's easier for optimizer to see the local variable needs to be a CPU registry and no memory access, speeding its performance.

Hm, i guess this depends on the compiler, but if that was the case then first use should be enough to figure out this. I guess classic Delphi had a very simple compiler so perhaps it needs this, but AFAIK modern Delphi has an LLVM backend whose optimizations shouldn't be affected by variable placement.

In any case, i think Free Pascal does have variable lifetime analysis so its optimizations shouldn't need that either.

Is this some inside joke that I am not getting? C# is nothing like Pascal. Java is the language closest to C#.

One person, Anders Hejlsberg, was a leading architect on Delphi and then on C#

His work on C# is widely thought to be a continuation of his work on Delphi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg

There's also plenty of other cross-pollination, e.g. the influence that Cedar or even Modula-3 had on Java.

Still, I can understand the issues. Let's not forget that despite his work in the field, Hejlsberg isn't Mr. Pascal, that would be Niklaus Wirth. Who always had a way more minimalistic design perspective than others, starting with Algol-W and ending with Oberon-7. Comparing that to the kitchen sink approach of C# (and arguably even Object Pascal) shows two philosophies that can hardly be more different.

I think that Delphi took a bit of a "kitchen sink" approach when compared to classic Pascal, for practical reasons of being most useful to a working programmer, rather than being academic.

Specifically the infamous yet influential essay "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language" has a laundry list of reasons why academic Pascal is hard to use "for serious programming", and many of them have been corrected in Delphi.

Many of them were already corrected in ISO Extended Pascal, UCSD Pascal and Apple's Object Pascal, before Borland happened.

> the kitchen sink approach of C# (and arguably even Object Pascal)

When Free Pascal is concerned there is no argument here... consider that the compiler has a special language "submode" that enables syntax just for interfacing with Cocoa/Objective-C objects (...or even the whole idea behind having different language modes and submodes in the first place - that is totally antithetical to Wirth's ideas, but in practice it is very useful).

I also prefer the minimalist approach to language design and even though I like Pascal, the modern incarnation of the language in FreePascal is simply too large. I feel the same about many popular languages. Perhaps it's inevitable as developers demand more features and the language accrues more features with each release. Even languages that start small(ish) over time grow to be quite large (e.g. Python).

> I also prefer the minimalist approach to language design and even though I like Pascal, the modern incarnation of the language in FreePascal is simply too large.

Then don't look at c# version 9. There's an expressive and modern (immutable and null safe by default) language somewhere in there struggling under the weight of previous syntax and semantics.

His work on C# was a continuation on his work on J++ actually.

Anyone knowing pascal will have made the jump to C# in 2006, everyone left are quite happy with Pascal, nobodies going to make the jump in 2020 IMHO

First he did J++, though.

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