Pascal deserves a second look

https://timcoatesinsights.wordpress.com/2024/10/31/why-pascal-deserves-a-second-look/

by AlexeyBrin • 2 years ago

58 52 2 years ago

timcoatesinsights.wordpress.com

davikr• 2 years ago

Pascal's compilation time is still unparalleled in its speed and that is one of its greatest features.

PaulHoule7• 2 years ago

True for Turbo. Not true for the truly atrocious UCSD Pascal.

Computer scientists circa 1980 were driven absolutely crazy by BASIC becoming the dominant teaching language in primary schools; with alternatives like UCSD Pascal, however, you are better off writing assembly.

romwell3• 2 years ago

Pascal = Turbo Pascal if we're taking late 80s/early 90s.

Everything else is blasphemy.

After that, Pascal = Delphi (for quite a while).

The fact that both are commercial, closed-source (and, in case of Delphi, quite pricey) packages is pretty much the sole reason Pascal lost out in popularity to languages that mere mortals could use at home without having to resort to piracy.

It took Embarcadero over a decade to realize that offering a free "Community Edition" of the IDE is a must to stay relevant. It was too late by then.

peutetre• 2 years ago

Go compiles fast: https://blog.howardjohn.info/posts/go-build-times/

anothername122• 2 years ago

34000 lines of code/min on an 8088 fast?

082349872349872• 2 years ago

Much of that (potential) compilation speed is due to Wirth's personality, but his circumstances also helped.

For industrial languages, programs will be compiled a few times while developing and debugging, and then run many, many more times in production.

For a teaching language, programs will be compiled more than a few times while learning and debugging, and then run never.

This situation has the corollary that teaching languages ought almost always to opt in favour of compilation speed over speed of compiled code.

(when I started programming, developers shared a minicomputer CPU, which meant that even with Unix, which prioritises editor threads over compiler threads, ends of quarters were brutal for load average and hence system responsiveness)

romwell3• 2 years ago

You say this as if fast compilation speed somehow means bad performance.

This is a false dichotomy. Pascal compiles fast and runs fast.

Then there's the fact that performance of a program depends on far more things than the language it's written in — and faster iteration cycles ease optimization and profiling on the level of algorithms, which is where you have most gains.

Squeezing that potential 3% speed up from using another language is rarely worth it then.

PaulHoule7• 2 years ago

Turbo Pascal was in the running with assembly language for my favorite language to program the IBM PC in the 1980s. ISO Pascal didn't have the facilities to do systems programming, like trapping an interrupt, but Turbo Pascal did. Even BASIC had PEEK and POKE which are unsafe but let you target hardware registers.

I fell out of the Pascal habit when I got to college because Turbo wasn't available for the Sun 68k and SPARC not to mention HP PA RISC workstations we had and soon I got my first 32-bit "home" computer and was using Linux so of course I switched to C, though I think mostly it was a step back.

bbarn2• 2 years ago

The last version of TP I used was I think 7? and it added in inline assembler. It was super nice for 14 year old me to learn assembly just enough to do the things TP couldn't do (like control a mouse on DOS). It was my gateway to a life of software development.

PaulHoule7• 2 years ago

I used that a bit (absolutely great) but that was near the end of my TP career, for the most part I wrote library subroutines in assembly.

For instance, the 8086 had a REP MOVS instruction that copies a block of bytes, the TP standard library used that for the copy data function. 80186 added REP MOVSW which would move 2 bytes at a time and be about two times faster on my 80286 machine. I had several replacements for library subroutines which took advantage of 80286 instructions to get much better performance.

pjmlp6• 2 years ago

Inline Assembly was already on Turbo Pascal 4.

whitehexagon• 2 years ago

Ah yes, and then was it Borland Pascal? I seem to recall a nice IDE through my old rose tinted glasses. But 8086? PC assembly I didnt get along with, having been spoiled with DevPac and 68000 Amiga world. But I had a lot of fun with the box drawing characters in the IBM PC 'font' putting together a small Pascal windowing utility blitting chunks of memory to swap overlapping window focus.

redprince• 2 years ago

Turbo Pascal was in the running with assembly language for my favorite language to program the IBM PC in the 1980s.

Teaching myself programming as a kid in the late 80s I encountered the limits of BASIC and then Turbo BASIC pretty soon. Everyone I knew was dabbling in Turbo Pascal but for some reason I can't really recall I rented K&R at the local library and went for Turbo C. I got an incredible amount of mileage out of that decision.

Learning x86 assembly was par for the course back then. Everything was so slow and that was the way to get everything out of the machine. I even remember me going to some length dabbling with the timer for the CPU hogging DRAM refresh cycle to squeeze out the last few percent of CPU power that poor 8086 had. Basically moving away from the conservative settings towards a point where the DRAM was just not becoming "forgetful".

PaulHoule7• 2 years ago

I saw Pascal on the VAX (sucked) in school before I really got into Turbo.

I saw C before I started using Turbo because I had a C compiler for the 6809 using this Unix-clone OS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-9

on a TRS-80 Color Computer and I was checking out the K&R C book and also the AT&T UNIX manual from the public library a lot: I had a project of implementing many of the "software tools" such as wc for OS-9 as well as developing tools compatible with ones people were using on CP/M bulletin boards like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LBR_(file_format)

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ_(program)

(Now I tried that last one in Microsoft BASIC and boy the bit handling was painful)

theodpHN• 2 years ago

Long before Python and Java, there was $49.95 Turbo Pascal for DOS!

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

pjmlp6• 2 years ago

With a great TUI experience, that apparently is now so fashionable, as if modern computers couldn't do more than DOS.

I loved Turbo Vision, but that was almost 40 years ago.

We can do better.

fp642• 2 years ago

I always liked Pascal but apart from being “nicely structured and thus good for beginners” the article doesn’t convince me that I should use it again. Probably would use Ada instead anyways, as that has some really good ideas and I always got along with it

notagoodidea• 2 years ago

Same but in both case, I am not sure what to actually program with Ada every time I try to learn it again. I am a bit to used to web/data programming I guess.

romwell3• 2 years ago

How about "performs as fast as C++, compiles as fast as Java"?

fp642• 2 years ago

Oh, I must have missed the real-world benchmarks and experience reports in that article. Yeah, it's not as slow as Python, who would have thunk.

IshKebab• 2 years ago

That doesn't seem to be the case. Looks like it is a small number of times slower than C++.

adamc• 2 years ago

One of the first languages I learned, along with Basic and PL1. But I bought a Mac, and, at the time, they were programmed in C.

biesnecker• 2 years ago

Pascal was the language that AP Computer Science was taught in in the mid-90s when I took it. We used Turbo Pascal 6.0 for DOS, and I have fond memories. I think I'd still prefer C, but I appreciate the nostalgia.

hvs• 2 years ago

Turbo Pascal 6 was the first high-level language I learned after BASIC and my first job out of college was doing Delphi development. I loved programming in Pascal, not so much because of the syntax (it gets a bit clunky at times) but because of the speed and ease-of-use of the development environments. Similar to having a REPL in a language, fast compilation is amazingly helpful for development iteration. If you can test ideas quickly, you can reason about things more quickly (at least in my experience).

jll29• 2 years ago

I expected perhaps a reference to Brian W. Kernighan's excellent critique of Pascal from a systems programming perspective:

https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/bwk-on-pascal.html

I love Pascal's clarity, and enjoyed writing several years of Pascal and two years worth of Modula-2 in the 1980s and 1990s, but one has to admit Brian has some good points.

If Pascal was still actively used by more people, a new version of its ISO standard could incorporate many things that "happened since" if the community so choose.

pjmlp6• 2 years ago

That version not only did exist, it was called ISO Extended Pascal, however by then Apple's and Borland's Object Pascal was what everyone cares about.

That critic has nothing of excellent other than for UNIX heads.

It ignores that for quite some time, outside UNIX, C only existed in various dialects of K&R C like Small-C, RatC, and whatever else was around on CP/M, competing mainframes and what not.

Also ignores the existence of Modula-2, released three years prior to that rant.

AnimalMuppet2• 2 years ago

That wasn't a "rant", no matter how much it offends you.

Here's what it actually was: Kernighan and Plaugher wrote a book called "Software Tools". The code in it was written in RATFOR, which is a preprocessor for FORTRAN. After that book was written, Kernighan got the idea of re-writing it using Pascal. And it was hard - much harder than he expected. So after he did so, he asked himself, "Why was that so hard? Pascal should have been much better than RATFOR, and it wasn't. Why not?"

That's what the paper is about. (It's not even about C, so what C dialects existed, and where they existed, is completely irrelevant.) And the paper says that's what it's about.

And, having used an ISO standard Pascal, every word of it is true. (The only exception was that we had separate compilation.) Almost everything he said, I ran into. The problems were real, and they were painful.

Why didn't he use Modula-2? Because he didn't write the book in Modula-2. And why didn't he do that? He started the book in March 1980. Modula-2 probably had much less traction than Pascal at that time, so Pascal was a more reasonable language to pick for the book.

AnimalMuppet2• 2 years ago

That was written about the "standard Pascal" (the first standard). Turbo fixed most of that. (Maybe all, in that Turbo became a de-facto standard, so that even the "all the extensions are non-standard" didn't really apply.)

Rochus3• 2 years ago

Brian W. Kernighan's excellent critique of Pascal

Well, most of it was obsolete before the paper appeared (see Apple and Lisa Pascal), and the reason Pascal became very popular in the eighties was not the version Wirth created, but products like Turbo, VAX or Object Pascal, or the ones mentioned, and of course later also Delphi. Even Wirth himself demonstrated in his Oberon System, that the system could not be implemented without direct memory read write and pointer arithmetics (via SYSTEM module, and mostly without support of a type checker). The Pascal ISO standard came much too late and had little significance.

JohnFen• 2 years ago

Pascal was the very first language I ever learned, way back in the 70s. I have a soft spot for it to this day.

I wouldn't use it for a real project, though. It has meaningful problems and limitations that other languages don't have.

TomMasz• 2 years ago

Pascal was my first "real" programming language and the language used in my CS undergrad. I even used it to develop for a bare metal 68000 system and a MicroPDP-11. But once I learned C and found how much easier it was to do embedded development, I left it behind. I have Lazarus and FreePascal and play with them now then, but it's more a nostalgia thing than anything else. I should probably try developing something useful with it one of these days.

cynicalsecurity• 2 years ago

Just no.

systems• 2 years ago

my 2 cents

we need a good free open source rad tools

the rad market is dominated by very expensive commercial products, clarion, windev (pcsoft), outsystems , embarcadero, progress and few more

pascal, give the impression of a potentially nice (could be) rad tool, that make easy things trivial and hard things possible, but i think in practice it is not really

we need a nice foss rad devolpment environment, built around nicer and more modern languages , pascal is not a nice language , lazarus and other pascal ide are attractive though

tangus3• 2 years ago

It doesn't deserve a second look.

The only things Pascal has going for it nowadays are: (1) static executables and (2) some good libraries (and not many at that). As a language it's extremely primitive and unergonomic, and the Free Pascal maintainers don't really want to improve it because they are used to it.

As an implementation, it's the slowest compiled language there is. Everything is heap allocated (and reallocated) and it doesn't even have an efficient allocator, not to mention garbage collector.

The only reason there is to use Pascal nowadays is when you need one of the two things I mentioned and the results offset the torture that is programming in that language.

anothername122• 2 years ago

As an implementation, it's the slowest compiled language there

Are you talking about the Free Pascal implementation here?

tangus3• 2 years ago

Yes, but Delphi is no rocket either.

wolvesechoes• 2 years ago

"Everything is heap allocated"

Well, the second look would prove it false, so maybe it is worth it after all.

tangus3• 2 years ago

Yeah, well... you won't get very far with just TP-style objects and strings and without dynamic arrays.

BrandoElFollito• 2 years ago

Turbo Pascal will always have a sweet spot in my heart, it was the first language I learned in my first year at the uni.

I had a "Borland Turbo Pascal" book, a pirated TP and the IBM PC of my roommate. And a 8" disquette.

In still see myself after all these years programming Convey ' game of life (the lines in the screen updated 1 line per second) and wondering at 4 am how I can add a disease or Godzilla crossing the ecosystem.

Great memories.

Jeema101• 2 years ago

I recently ported an old Pascal game to Free Pascal. I had never really used Pascal before this particular project.

Learning the language was interesting, but there's a lot about it that seemed pretty irritating, the main one being the separation of variable declarations and code (similar to the original C spec). It also took me way too long to figure out how to properly construct an 'if-then-else' block without the compiler complaining about the syntax.

Can't say I would probably use it in a new project.

igtztorrero• 2 years ago

Use GoLang, it's better

Fuhrmanator• 2 years ago

As a Mac developer (system 6, 7) in the late 80s, I always wrote in C. But Mac devs couldn't escape Pascal, because the many Mac OS functions (in the ROM) were from Pascal.

You had to differentiate between C and Pascal strings, and you'd better well have declared that Mac OS call-back function in C with the 'pascal' keyword, lest you be shocked when your software crashes and you debug it in MacsBug to find the order of arguments is reversed on the stack! Doh!

In the early 90s I coded lots in Modula 2 (for what it's Wirth) on Solaris, but never got much chance to do Pascal directly.

Pascal deserves a second look

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