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Comment by lastdong | Hacker News Reader

Pascal was great! Would love to see a page with currently in production software written in Pascal.

Lazarus looks neat, but could a more modern IDE like vs code be used?

One thing it always come to mind is how Borland really did their documentation right, with lots of examples. Made it super easy to learn Pascal.

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> Would love to see a page with currently in production software written in Pascal

Here are some lists:

https://www.embarcadero.com/case-study

https://blogs.embarcadero.com/category/showcase/

https://github.com/Fr0sT-Brutal/awesome-pascal

Great stuff. I’m still so surprised to find Pascal popping up now and then in HN, and actually base for large codebases still in production nowadays.

> Would love to see a page with currently in production software written in Pascal.

Not sure about a page with a list, but I know that Altium Designer (one of the big commercial electronic design automation platforms) is at least partially written in Delphi. The executable of one of the last versions contains this string: "Embarcadero Delphi for Win64 compiler version 30.0 (23.0.21418.4207)". The platform even uses a Pascal-based scripting language named DelphiScript...

Original standard pascal was shitty. Strings had a strongly typed length, so you couldnt write a function which accepts strings of different length. Also (what I personally really dislike) the syntax doesnt allow you to write your own 'write' function (since lets call it variadic parameters were not allowed).

Turbo Pascal was better and Delphi pascal was great.

Something that was already sorted out by USCD and ISO Extended Pascal time, features that were later adopted by Turbo Pascal.

VMS Pascal was also quite alright.

Also Modula-2, which sorted out all the issues related with original Pascal, was introduced in 1978.

So everyone that focused on the original Pascal as reason for not using Pascal, was having a fossilized mindset.

I think that biggest culprit for it was the widespread of p2c in UNIX.

FL Studio : A digital audio workstation written in pascal https://learndelphi.org/fl-studio-is-a-massively-popular-dig...

No way! This is amazing, I used to play with Fruity Loops many moons ago, it’s really well done. Thank you for sharing.

Pascal was the first programming language I had contact with, in high school. I have fond memories of it. Recently I looked into the status of current software written in Pascal. One thing I noted is few of them are packaged in Linux repositories. Wonder what causes that. Is it harder to package Pascal software for Linux, when compared to the average C package?

Pascal programs are much easier to package, since the usual Pascal libraries are linked statically. You get a standalone binary, you can distribute.

I have tried to submit some of my Pascal programs to the repositories, but nothing happens. You cannot pack it yourself, but need to get support from a distribution maintainer. They try to compile it, discover that they do not have a Pascal compiler installed, and give up on it

Unbelievable. It makes one sad to hear that.

As of my last look a couple of months back, the extensions for Pascal in Code weren’t particularly usable. Omni Pascal may get there. There’s a language server in development but I don’t know anything about it.

Omni Pascal looks exactly what I was thinking about. Definitely one to keep up with. Thank you

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