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Comment by foldl2022 | Hacker News Reader

foldl2022·

Lazarus is still my favorite when developing desktop apps.

Language is not a problem. Pascal is just C/C++ in another favor. LCL/VCL is a wonderful library, everything just works like what I am expecting.

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Me too! I have a software in production for a client made with Lazarus 3 (in Pascal of course) and everybody loves the "Windows feel" of the Gui. On Linux there is Gambas [1] wich is like Lazarus but for Basic.

[1] https://gambaswiki.org/website/en/main.html

Lazarus is available on Linux too, and on some other platforms as well, is what I've read on its site.

I had a client habing trouble with and old vb6 software they where using in production. Replaced it with a lazarus app, and been running for 10 years now without problems.

Pascal is more ALGOL than C

ALGOL-60 was huge, in around 1960. Niklaus Wirth had a detailed proposal for the next version of ALGOL, to be called ALGOL-X.

The ALGOL committee rejected it, choosing a competing and much more complex language headed by Adriaan van Wijngaarden. This became ALGOL-68 -- and killed ALGOL.

Wirth took what was known as ALGOL-W and turned it into Pascal.

FWIW I wrote about this:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/04/niklaus_wirth_obituar...

https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/07/algol_68_comes_to_gcc...

Another offshoot of Algol-60 was CPL, intended to be more general-purpose and capable. But it was big and hard work to get it working.

So Martin Richards designed, a simpler intermediate version, BCPL. (He also built an OS in it, TRIPOS. This formed part of AmigaOS 1.x.)

BCPL was further stripped down to B, and then evolved into C.

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