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Author Topic: Standard Pascal ISO 7185:1990 and Extended Pascal ISO/IEC 10206:1991  (Read 12838 times)

PascalDragon

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Re: Standard Pascal ISO 7185:1990 and Extended Pascal ISO/IEC 10206:1991
« Reply #30 on: December 01, 2019, 10:13:22 am »
Sorry, I know I'm not qualified to post here but I would like to see someday people could come up with kernel module written in Pascal, people used Pascal to develop their existing OS side by side with C thanks to the painless interfacing between Pascal and C, we could import C header and have it generate working Pascal unit without having to edit anything by hand... Ah, it's just dreaming!
Take a look here. Don't know if it still works though. :-[
And for Windows there is this. :)

marcov

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Re: Standard Pascal ISO 7185:1990 and Extended Pascal ISO/IEC 10206:1991
« Reply #31 on: December 01, 2019, 04:31:59 pm »
Having standalone compilers doesn't mean it is not RAD dependent. At least not any more than C++ does.
It looks like I didn't make the point clearly.  Here is the point: if Delphi and Lazarus (the environments) "magically" vanished, the use of Pascal would drop significantly.  That is not the case with C, FORTRAN and/or COBOL. 

Maybe. But I think if the major use case for e.g. Fortran (Math) or Cobol (Banks) would disappear, the same would happen. It is like saying Pascal is fine, if banks mass-migrated to another language. But then Cobol would be (even more) in trouble.

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Programmers that use those languages don't choose those languages because there is some "cushy" environment available for them, they will probably choose a particular _implementation_ of the language because there is a more flexible/powerful environment for them but, the choice of language isn't determined by that.

As said, I don't believe that. Those languages are just there because they got lucky long ago, and it simply takes a long time to erode. There is nothing to learn there, except getting a niche for yourself.

But creating such a niche is more chance than planning, and can't be achieved by merely copying others.

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For C, Fortran and/or COBOL, as long as there is a decent debugger and editor available in addition to a decent compiler, that's all it takes.  For Pascal, if you take away Delphi and or Lazarus, the result will often be "Goodbye Pascal" (very unfortunately.)

You make it to tooling centric.  It is not about tooling configuration, but about major usecase.

For Pascal RAD languages are the main use case, sure. But the main use cases of Fortran and Cobol have been eroding for decades. (I come from organic chemistry, and even in my time, +/- 2000 many computational  groups were migrating to C++ for computational work). The fact that you can still write fortran with VI doesn't really save them from that.

You are trying to make something out of nothing.

If two out of three of (LLVM,GCC,VS) die, you have probably also a significant drop. Even more so if the rumours are true that VS will change to LLVM. (which I still find a bit odd)

Cutting out the most major players always hurts. For any language.
If two out of the three major implementations of the C language were to disappear, the most likely result is that a replacement implementation would appear shortly thereafter.  That cannot be said about Pascal.

That depends. If they disappear, the related multinationals will probably ALSO migrate to something different (like Rust), severely eroding C's dominance in system programming.

Of course C's dominance and associated inertia in that space is so large that it might still remain fairly strong (on e.g. the linux business alone).   Cobol and Fortran are much more vulnerable however.

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Quite a few C compilers have come and gone before we got to the current status quo but, C remained popular.

Not really. It has been eroding and retreating on its old system programming niche for decades now. Application level C has been going only down since 2000, with C++ and C#/Java picking up most of the slack. Even GNU migrated several major codebases (GCC,GDB) to C++.

Those languages stood or fell by their 4GL database product. Lazarus/Delphi is different that it makes apps, and a much wider array.
But Pascal has the same weakness those 4GL database products have/had.  The popularity of Pascal is dependent on the RAD environments.  Only a minority choose Pascal because of the language's power, the majority choose it because of the RAD environments associated with it.

I think that is a gross oversimplification.  If only because those other languages often just tied you to one or two database products.

But yes, if you are not a top 5 language, you are vulnerable. No question about that.

If C had lost Unix in say 1990, most of us couldn't even name it by now.
That's quite likely to be true but, the fact is, it was used to develop a successful O/S. It proved that, in the hands of a reasonably knowledgeable programmer it is powerful enough to write an O/S with it. Pascal doesn't have that and that makes a big difference to programmers that code low level routines.

Both Windows and Mac OS  originally had large portions in Pascal. So this is simply not true.

Cobol is already more or less in that space (except the much regurgitated "in financial institutions", but most of that is heresay rather than actual practical knowledge).
Poor COBOL language.  Non COBOL programmers love to put it down.  I just want to point out that just because it is hearsay to you, it doesn't mean it is actually hearsay.  It is a _fact_, not hearsay, that you'll find a lot more COBOL code in financial institutions than you'll find Pascal code.

IMHO most of that sentiment was (C) 2000, and back then it was already decreasing. Of course a lot of code is not touch and will run another 40 years with minimal maintenance, but does that mean anything for the status of the language Cobol *NOW*. ?

It is just the same inertia, that large bodies of code long ago don't disappear overnight. Sure some maintenance and expansion is done, but IMHO you make that to be much more than it is worth, and deflect criticism on those conclusions with simplistic "but it is still more than Pascal" jabs. Pointless.

but loosing slowly to C++ libraries with scripting languages on top of them.
It's quite likely there is some of that but, I'm rather skeptical that they'll ever be able to displace FORTRAN.  You can use a shoe as a hammer but, shoes are very unlikely to displace hammers.

Fortran is not a hammer but a rock, which is the traditional way of hammering. Relatively simple, the first tool available widely, but slowly replaced by more refined and focused tools.

And as said Fortran was already decreasing in computational maths  (at least in the chemistry sphere) in the early 2000s. I haven't kept up though.

But the delusion is that it has anything to do with features or planning. They just hit the jackpot somewhere during their existence in being tied to an application that was so big it became self-fulfilling, and which will take a long time to atrophy naturally.
Undoubtedly there is likely a good bit of that in the case of C but, very little of that in the continued use of FORTRAN and COBOL.

Linking it to properties of the language, or some grand plan is just delusional. Chance and other non technical, non-language reasons. Nothing more.
It's not as delusional as you are implying.  C is successful in system programming because it demonstrated that it can be used for that purpose _and_ no comprehensive better alternative has showed up.  C won the systems programming race in spite of its being a race horse in a wheelchair, because in spite of its wheelchair having dodecagonal wheels, the other horse's wheelchairs had square wheels.  Rather regrettably, programmers get used to dodecagonal wheels much too easily (and no matter how poorly they perform, there is always a programmer ready to point out "it works!", therefore no better way should be implemented - that should sound familiar to you.)

I totally disagree. IMHO it is just old codebases and inertia. The inertia is what kept the alternatives away, not the features. But C doesn't evolve and the gap is getting bigger and bigger.  Specially since the system part is getting bigger and bigger.

Don't get me wrong, the inertia is not over yet (contrary to cobol and fortran which are decreasing), but new contenders will start to eat.

simone

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Re: Standard Pascal ISO 7185:1990 and Extended Pascal ISO/IEC 10206:1991
« Reply #32 on: December 01, 2019, 04:39:52 pm »
My point of view is that every programmer can choose the language according to his own skills and needs.  I love the Object Pascal and I really like the philosophy of Lazarus & FPC.  I have no doubt about this.  My painful question is another.  In a software project that involves an important investment in terms of resources, the choice of the programming language and the development environment must ensure a reasonable degree of certainty about the future.  Lazarus and FPC are carried out by volunteers who generously offer their time and knowledge to the community.  But who can guarantee that this will still be possible for a reasonably long time?
« Last Edit: December 01, 2019, 05:05:43 pm by simone »
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guest64953

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Re: Standard Pascal ISO 7185:1990 and Extended Pascal ISO/IEC 10206:1991
« Reply #33 on: December 01, 2019, 05:11:52 pm »
Sorry, I know I'm not qualified to post here but I would like to see someday people could come up with kernel module written in Pascal, people used Pascal to develop their existing OS side by side with C thanks to the painless interfacing between Pascal and C, we could import C header and have it generate working Pascal unit without having to edit anything by hand... Ah, it's just dreaming!
Take a look here. Don't know if it still works though. :-[
And for Windows there is this. :)

The code looks so alien, specially the Linux version. Could we bring RAD development to cover this area also? Being able to develop kernel module the easier way. Currently, it's no benefit to prefer Pascal over C for such a job, but if we could make this job become as easy as drag and drop to design a form, it'll be a real game changer  :)

kupferstecher

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Re: Standard Pascal ISO 7185:1990 and Extended Pascal ISO/IEC 10206:1991
« Reply #34 on: December 01, 2019, 05:16:40 pm »
In my point of view there are a lot of people longing for an alternative for c-style languages, and that is the real chance of Pascal and also one reason for its current success. And there is success. The community may not be the biggest, but there are also young people starting with FreePascal/Lazarus and not only such coming from Delphi or with old codebases in the cellar. Also FreePascal reaches new markets, the mobile platforms are an example.

Also the shrink of the desktop market in my eyes is a great chance for Lazarus, as there won't come up other significant tools, while Lazarus is getting better and better.
And thats how I came to Lazarus, in a elektronics forum I read: "If you want to make multiplattform GUI applications you  h a v e  to use Lazarus". This was about 5 years before.

Some concepts like the begin..end (which I consider nearly as bad as the c brakets "{}") are repelling some potential users, but perhaps it's not possible to overcome such legacies.

marcov

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Re: Standard Pascal ISO 7185:1990 and Extended Pascal ISO/IEC 10206:1991
« Reply #35 on: December 01, 2019, 05:17:51 pm »
My point of view is that every programmer can choose the language according to his own skills and needs. 

Development system as a whole. Language is only a part of that.

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I love the Object Pascal and I really like the philosophy of Lazarus & FPC.  I have no doubt about this.  My painful question is another.  In a software project that involves an important investment in terms of resources, the choice of the programming language and the development environment must ensure a reasonable degree of certainty about the future. 

In reality there are very few such guarantees, with any language. While languages might continue to exist, quite often frameworks do not. As soon as your specific niche dies, it can be very painful.

How painful depends on how hard you want it to succeed. At some point you might need to manage parts of your toolchain and libraries yourself.  Lazarus/Free Pascal gives you that possibility.

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Re: Standard Pascal ISO 7185:1990 and Extended Pascal ISO/IEC 10206:1991
« Reply #36 on: December 01, 2019, 05:31:34 pm »
I often hear people on this forum praise Pascal and bash C, e.g: C code is ugly, C code is very difficult to parse... I'm not an expert in this area but I would say C++ tooling already filled the gap. Eclipse CDT (I'm using the Cevelop version) is miles a head of Lazarus, let alone Visual Studio or CLion. QtCreator also very decent. I'm saying about their code completion ability, aka intellisense, not RAD development, which render Lazarus nothing more than a mere text editor embedded into a RAD environment. Some text editors with proper language server setup even could outpower Lazarus. Don't get me wrong, I'm saying the truth.

I didn't tried it (because I don't like anything Microsoft related) but I think people which only do command line programming would switch to VSCode immediately if TMS's Object Pascal extension's quality become somewhat as good as the C# counterpart. I know Lazarus will not care because it's mostly about GUI and RAD, not cmd programs.

Tooling is the most important thing I would consider before choosing a programming language. Despite how good a language is, without a decent IDE it's not an option. I will prefer C/C++ with it current IDE support now over Lazarus/Pascal, if I'm not doing GUI, though  >:D

guest64953

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Re: Standard Pascal ISO 7185:1990 and Extended Pascal ISO/IEC 10206:1991
« Reply #37 on: December 01, 2019, 05:37:46 pm »
In my point of view there are a lot of people longing for an alternative for c-style languages, and that is the real chance of Pascal and also one reason for its current success. And there is success. The community may not be the biggest, but there are also young people starting with FreePascal/Lazarus and not only such coming from Delphi or with old codebases in the cellar. Also FreePascal reaches new markets, the mobile platforms are an example.

Also the shrink of the desktop market in my eyes is a great chance for Lazarus, as there won't come up other significant tools, while Lazarus is getting better and better.
And thats how I came to Lazarus, in a elektronics forum I read: "If you want to make multiplattform GUI applications you  h a v e  to use Lazarus". This was about 5 years before.

Some concepts like the begin..end (which I consider nearly as bad as the c brakets "{}") are repelling some potential users, but perhaps it's not possible to overcome such legacies.

I would vote for FreeBasic over FreePascal if I'm choosing a C alternative with just like C but friendlier, but you will have choose for yourself a limitted subset of the FreeBasic language, though, this language has so many keywords that make me sick. Making C library binding for FreeBasic also easier than for FreePascal, you just check the language and will immediately see this, how similar to C it is!

About begin..end I'm disagree. Do you consider using identation and space like Python is better than curly braces or begin..end? If you think so, I have nothing to said.

simone

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Re: Standard Pascal ISO 7185:1990 and Extended Pascal ISO/IEC 10206:1991
« Reply #38 on: December 01, 2019, 05:45:50 pm »
Development system as a whole. Language is only a part of that.

I absolutely agree.  My reflection concerns languages ​​and IDEs because this is the subject of the thread.

In reality there are very few such guarantees, with any language. While languages might continue to exist, quite often frameworks do not. As soon as your specific niche dies, it can be very painful.

I also agree on this point, but always limiting myself to the programming language, Object Pascal is a much riskier choice, because in fact there are only two compilers / IDEs.

How painful depends on how hard you want it to succeed. At some point you might need to manage parts of your toolchain and libraries yourself.  Lazarus/Free Pascal gives you that possibility.

True in principle, but I don't know how concretely it is possible on a large scale.
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lucamar

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Re: Standard Pascal ISO 7185:1990 and Extended Pascal ISO/IEC 10206:1991
« Reply #39 on: December 01, 2019, 05:59:01 pm »
In my point of view there are a lot of people longing for an alternative for c-style languages, and that is the real chance of Pascal and also one reason for its current success. And there is success. The community may not be the biggest, but there are also young people starting with FreePascal/Lazarus and not only such coming from Delphi or with old codebases in the cellar.

Note that Pascal (I mean "modern" Pascal, as in Delphi) was not really positioned as an alternative to C/C++ but as a contender for the then flourishing Visual Basic (for Windows) market, and its main strengths were the two-way IDE and database access. That's in fact from where the name came: "Where does one go to consult the Oracle? To Delphi" :)

C and Pascal where, in the beginning, sister languages descending (by devious routes in the case of C) from Algol but their paths diverged relatively quickly (in 10-20 years); despite the traditional "war" of C vs. Pascal, they came to be applied to different purposes, system-level vs. applications programming.

Here Borland did a diservice to Pascal by positioning it against VB. Of course, they had no BASIC while they did have a C/C++ product so it made some kind of sense to try to lure away VB users to Delphi. The problem is that it made Delphi/Pascal look as just an alternative to VB, while C/C++ programmers could select between VC and BC (or Watcom!) and keep using their beloved language. The end result was to make Pascal a cousin of BASIC (with all it entails) instead of a contender with C, so lots of Pascal programmers ended up "updating" from Pascal to C/C++ which had the advantage of being the "API language" everywhere but on MacOS (and even there, after a while).
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marcov

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Re: Standard Pascal ISO 7185:1990 and Extended Pascal ISO/IEC 10206:1991
« Reply #40 on: December 01, 2019, 05:59:24 pm »
In reality there are very few such guarantees, with any language. While languages might continue to exist, quite often frameworks do not. As soon as your specific niche dies, it can be very painful.

I also agree on this point, but always limiting myself to the programming language, Object Pascal is a much riskier choice, because in fact there are only two compilers / IDEs.

I used to think that way too, but when I saw people that migrated from Delphi to MS in the dot com boom suffer and despair in the 2005-2008 period when Microsoft lost interest in MFC and tried to force everybody to .NET, I realised that in practice it is rarely so simple.

VB6 and C++ MFC were at that point ( the years before .NET 2 was released) the most used application toolchains, at that point recommended by the most dominant vendor, and STILL both got hit really, really hard, while according to such philosophies that shouldn't be possible.

At the same time, I was using Delphi, which was universally ridiculed and said to be dying. I've had only one medium migration (the unicode change in 2009), and all other routes would have required investments and maintenance that would now have been invalidated for a large part.

I then realised that such cliche certainties are just for self-comforting purposes, and for IT-managers to avoid being held accountable if something goes wrong.

In reality there is no certain way of picking a very long term winner. You just try to make the choice for the coming few years the best you can, and then you'll just see.  And in general, most threats don't really materialize, meaning that most investments to mitigate them are in vain, or at least not worthwhile.

How painful depends on how hard you want it to succeed. At some point you might need to manage parts of your toolchain and libraries yourself.  Lazarus/Free Pascal gives you that possibility.

True in principle, but I don't know how concretely it is possible on a large scale.

So assume you now made MS MFC apps on Windows, and Microsoft declared that the next VS only would do .NET gui apps (which, in 2007 was actually pretty much what seemed to be happening). What do you do?

marcov

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Re: Standard Pascal ISO 7185:1990 and Extended Pascal ISO/IEC 10206:1991
« Reply #41 on: December 01, 2019, 06:03:21 pm »
borland did a diservice to Pascal by positioning it against VB. Of course, they had no BASIC while they did have a C/C++ product so it made some kind of sense to try to lure away VB users to Delphi. The problem is that it made Delphi/Pascal look as just an alternative to VB, while C/C++ programmers could select between VC and BC (or Watcom!) and keep using their beloved language. The end result was to make Pascal a cousin of BASIC (with all it entails) instead of a contender with C, so lots of Pascal programmers ended up "updating" from Pascal to C/C++ which had the advantage of being the "API language" everywhere but on MacOS (and even there, after a while).

The problem was that in the late nineties and early 2000s Microsoft employed predatory pricing with VS. The investments in it were huge, yet pricing was set to exactly 3/4 of Delphi.

There is no course that leads to success in such situation where one competitor pours vast sums into its IDE from its OS sales, while the other must do with the money they get of IDE sales.


440bx

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Re: Standard Pascal ISO 7185:1990 and Extended Pascal ISO/IEC 10206:1991
« Reply #42 on: December 01, 2019, 06:22:11 pm »

Honestly, I think you're in denial.  The main reason FPC is attractive to some programmers is the existence of Lazarus, not because of the features/abilities of the Pascal language.   That is supported by the _fact_ that GNU Pascal is dead.  If there had been a Lazarus like environment for GNU Pascal, it _might_ still be alive (FPC is).



Maybe. But I think if the major use case for e.g. Fortran (Math) or Cobol (Banks) would disappear, the same would happen.
The major "use case" of FORTRAN and COBOL are not about to disappear anytime soon.  Business applications are needed and so are heavy computational applications.  There is no major "use case" (as you put it) for Pascal.  The only reason it still has some life is because applications such as Delphi and Lazarus allow some people with very little programming knowledge to write simple programs.  Without that crutch Pascal would be gone (as GNU Pascal has already demonstrated.)


As said, I don't believe that. Those languages are just there because they got lucky long ago, and it simply takes a long time to erode. There is nothing to learn there, except getting a niche for yourself.
Unix wasn't written with "luck".  It was written in/with C.   Also, a language, in this case C, that has roughly 16% of the programmers' mindshare is hardly a "niche" language.  Object Pascal at roughly 2% is a niche and one it wouldn't have if it weren't because of the RAD environments that depend on it.

But creating such a niche is more chance than planning, and can't be achieved by merely copying others.
Some luck is involved but, COBOL is a good example of a language whose existence is due to planning and, it was quite effective.  As far as the copying you mention, just about every language copies from other languages.  The syntax may vary significantly but the programming concepts built into the language, don't.

You make it to tooling centric.  It is not about tooling configuration, but about major usecase.
Not for Pascal.  It's very likely that the reason Pascal still has a little bit of life is because of the tools that use it, specifically, Delphi and Lazarus.  Without them, it's quite likely that it would be shrink-wrapped in a coffin.

For Pascal RAD languages are the main use case, sure.
Pascal isn't a RAD language, not even close but, it has degraded into one which is why I compare it to Clarion and other such environment languages. Pascal's "main use case" is being a language to teach programming and, other choices, such as C are now preferred by most educational institutions.

But the main use cases of Fortran and Cobol have been eroding for decades.
There is some truth to that.  COBOL applications area has eroded because of the availability of relational database systems which include very flexible and powerful languages (PL/SQL comes to mind) but, those RDBMs do great when using the database but, far from great when it comes to providing the capabilities of a full fledged programming language. 

(I come from organic chemistry, and even in my time, +/- 2000 many computational  groups were migrating to C++ for computational work). The fact that you can still write fortran with VI doesn't really save them from that.
IMO, choosing C++ over FORTRAN for computationally intensive programs borders on insanity.  The FORTRAN code will be a lot clearer, easier to understand, easier to maintain and much less prone to contain bugs than whatever can be produced in C++ to accomplish the same goal.  That said, it is true that C++ has managed to erode some of FORTRAN's territory but, not much.

You are trying to make something out of nothing.
I'm simply trying to show that Pascal has none of the functional advantages other programming languages such as C, FORTRAN and COBOL among others have.  Pascal has no clear useful purpose anymore and that is one of the reasons there is no standards body interested in improving it.  You may call that "nothing" but without that "nothing", Pascal's future is rather uncertain.

If two out of three of (LLVM,GCC,VS) die, you have probably also a significant drop. Even more so if the rumours are true that VS will change to LLVM. (which I still find a bit odd)
That's like saying that if someone dried the Atlantic ocean there wouldn't be any water in it.   In the rather extreme example you offered above, a new C compiler would be written rather quickly.  If Pascal disappeared (both FPC and Lazarus) the implementation of a new Pascal compiler is far from certain.

Cutting out the most major players always hurts. For any language.
Cutting out all the "major players" could happen to Pascal but, rather unlikely to happen to C, COBOL and/or Fortran for instance.

If two out of the three major implementations of the C language were to disappear, the most likely result is that a replacement implementation would appear shortly thereafter.  That cannot be said about Pascal.


That depends. If they disappear, the related multinationals will probably ALSO migrate to something different (like Rust), severely eroding C's dominance in system programming.
The problem with the obvious fallacy you stated above is that, all that C code isn't going to migrate itself to Rust overnight.  Even a company with very large resources that is interested in migrating to Rust will take a very long time to get there and keep depending on C.

It has been eroding and retreating on its old system programming niche for decades now. Application level C has been going only down since 2000, with C++ and C#/Java picking up most of the slack. Even GNU migrated several major codebases (GCC,GDB) to C++.
I've never thought of C as being particularly well suited as an application's programming language.  It's about time it would start losing influence in that area.  It is losing some terrain in that area because, now there are finally some halfway decent alternatives (though Pascal was a good one but, it was eclipsed by all the shiny razzle-dazzle of RAD environments.)

I think that is a gross oversimplification.  If only because those other languages often just tied you to one or two database products.
It's not an oversimplification.  It's the same problem as 4GL language have.  Pascal got tied to RAD environments, namely Delphi and Lazarus.  It lost its self standing, just like a 4GL has no standing without the database(s) they act upon.

Both Windows and Mac OS  originally had large portions in Pascal. So this is simply not true.
The Windows version that included Pascal code couldn't be considered an O/S, it could barely show some data in tiled windows.  The Mac OS was a _joke_ until Apple finally decided to write something that could legitimately be called an O/S by using the BSD code base.  A good portion of the Lisa OS was written in Pascal and the Lisa OS was well known to have some rather significant deficiencies (though, to be fair, a great number of them were not related to its being written in Pascal but, it contributed to showing Pascal as falling short of the mark when it comes to writing an O/S.)

It is just the same inertia, that large bodies of code long ago don't disappear overnight. Sure some maintenance and expansion is done, but IMHO you make that to be much more than it is worth, and deflect criticism on those conclusions with simplistic "but it is still more than Pascal" jabs. Pointless.
Not pointless at all.  You are desperately trying to evade the fact that without Delphi and Lazarus (environments for RAD), the Pascal language would probably be dead by now.  Unlike Pascal, neither COBOL nor FORTRAN depend on an environment to keep them alive, they stand on their own merits, Pascal did at one time but, not anymore and, that is a very significant problem.

The inertia is what kept the alternatives away, not the features.
We definitely disagree.  In spite of the fact that I strongly dislike C, I still use it because there are times when the combination of features it offers makes getting the job done easier in C than in Pascal (and that is _very_ annoying because there is _no_ good reason for Pascal to be missing those features, it is because of people like _you_ who refuse to improve the language.)


The one thing all these discussions have in common is, they lead nowhere and don't produce any desirable results.  That may be another reason why there hasn't been a Pascal standard in so many years.




In a software project that involves an important investment in terms of resources, the choice of the programming language and the development environment must ensure a reasonable degree of certainty about the future. 
Quite true and, institutions which use C, COBOL or FORTRAN don't have to worry about that.  Institutions which use Pascal definitely do.
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simone

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Re: Standard Pascal ISO 7185:1990 and Extended Pascal ISO/IEC 10206:1991
« Reply #43 on: December 01, 2019, 06:25:03 pm »
 
So assume you now made MS MFC apps on Windows, and Microsoft declared that the next VS only would do .NET gui apps (which, in 2007 was actually pretty much what seemed to be happening). What do you do?

If I were forced to look for an alternative to Object Pascal/FPC/Lazarus (and I hope this never happens), I would never choose proprietary technologies like those from Microsoft, just to avoid lock-in problems like the one you described.  In the desktop scenario, for example, I would choose C ++ with one of many  opensource compilers / IDEs available.
« Last Edit: December 01, 2019, 06:31:58 pm by simone »
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Re: Standard Pascal ISO 7185:1990 and Extended Pascal ISO/IEC 10206:1991
« Reply #44 on: December 01, 2019, 06:44:22 pm »
Honestly, I think you're in denial. 

Of what exactly?  Let's summarize:

I don't dispute the facts that Pascal is not the most popular one. I don't dispute that Fortran and Cobol have dying niches, I don't dispute that while C is slowly getting irrelevant in application space, real threats in the system space have still to emerge (maybe with Rust?).

I agree to differ on the fact that I think they have been in decline for nearly two decades (less so for C), and that you believe they are still going strong.

BUT the core disagreement is that  you really want to push the narrative that this is because of intrinsic properties of either language or its ecosystem. (because they use editors, not RADs)

I don't buy that at all, I believe that the indisputed facts are the result of inertia relating to dominant positions in the (quite distant) past, and ties with dominant vendors during that time, and thus there is not much to learn from these languages wrt strategy or by mindlessly copying features.

Neither of those will convince those users to cross-over.

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The main reason FPC is attractive to some programmers is the existence of Lazarus, not because of the features/abilities of the Pascal language.   That is supported by the _fact_ that GNU Pascal is dead.  If there had been a Lazarus like environment for GNU Pascal, it _might_ still be alive (FPC is).

GPC failed to catch on long before Lazarus was even viable. They never even made TP level. See an old write-up of mine at http://www.stack.nl/~marcov/gpctxt.txt

In some ways, GPC problems (as in low non-core submissions) are still relevant, in FPC context today.

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The major "use case" of FORTRAN and COBOL are not about to disappear anytime soon. 

The major use cases are totally in decline. Old systems are still maintained/expanded, but it is getting less and less and has been the case for close to two decades.

The only money/mindshare there is to keep the old junk running a bit longer.

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There is no major "use case" (as you put it) for Pascal.  The only reason it still has some life is because applications such as Delphi and Lazarus allow some people with very little programming knowledge to write simple programs.  Without that crutch Pascal would be gone (as GNU Pascal has already demonstrated.)

Pascal doesn't have some dominant historic position anymore. True. So what ? As I showed in the thread with Simone, that is at most a false security.

Unix wasn't written with "luck".  It was written in/with C.   

Self furfilling argument. I say C is only important because of Unix, you say Unix is great because of C. So we together we have a circular argument here.

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Also, a language, in this case C, that has roughly 16% of the programmers' mindshare is hardly a "niche" language.  Object Pascal at roughly 2% is a niche and one it wouldn't have if it weren't because of the RAD environments that
depend on it.

Neither was true at the point they are started to divergate.

I think if there is a point to be made, is that Pascal was mostly entrenched in Europe, while the emerging IT superpowers were nearly all US based (except for SAP that continued to use Pascal for a while).


« Last Edit: December 01, 2019, 06:50:57 pm by marcov »

 

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