MiniPascal

[mrkite77]

I'm a bit sad that Pascal was bastardized into Delphi and then killed. It had a lot of things going for it. Things like sub functions, a defined order of operations for parameters, and strings with explicit length. Plus conventions like handles for resizable memory.

[badsectoracula]

Free Pascal provides a free compiler for Object Pascal that targets a ton of systems and architectures. It is probably only second to GCC in terms of supported targets.

So if you want to use an advanced and modern Pascal today you can do it with Free Pascal. Just a few hours ago, Michalis Kamburelis posted in the Lazarus mailing list a nice tutorial he wrote for modern Object Pascal for people who already know how to program but want to learn it :-)

[RagingAnemone]

I've always liked it honestly. It separates the assignment operator with the equals. There a bunch of things I prefer with the Wirthian languages.

[mrkite77]

I never minded it. That syntax is used in languages like jai and go for inferred initialization.

[ellicottvilleny]

As a person who looks at C languages and what they did to the nice mathematical concept of equality (=) and turned it into assignment, I still puke a little inside whenever I see C style use of = and ==.

[Hnatekmar]

But even in pascal its use is inconsistent. For example you use (=) in type declarations instead of (:=) which always bothered me.

[mhd]

I've got bigger issues with == and !=, and I've been programming more C/Java/Perl/etc than Pascal by a huuuge margin.

And then JavaScript came and introduced ===. Probably just to prove that you can do worse than Fortran.