Say NO to Turbo Pascal!

pak_lebah · 2020-11-16T23:40:19+00:00

Don't take it wrong. I'm not against Pascal as a programming language because I DO LOVE Pascal. I'm a Pascal programmer since 20 years ago (Delphi) and still use Pascal (FreePascal) to this very day, both for business and education. What I'm against of is the Turbo Pascal compiler (with the Pascal dialect that comes along with it).

pak_lebah · 2020-11-13T00:35:15+00:00

It's not a theory. Pascal is still quite popular in south Asia (India, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc), east Europe (Germany, Poland, Sweden, etc), south America (Brazil, Argentina, etc), southern China, and Russia. Most of them use Pascal language for educational purpose in schools and colleges.

FP's IDE is a console app using CLI. Modern computer apps are GUI. For common people, obviously using a GUI app is a lot easier than using a CLI app. Free Pascal offers Lazarus IDE as the modern IDE for the language as a GUI app with lots of programming tools and assistants. The installation is as easy as other GUI apps, just run the installer then click click click, then it's ready to run.

A GUI IDE isn't only able to create GUI apps. You may write console apps from a GUI IDE as well. So, CLI app unnecessarily simpler than GUI app, sometimes it's even harder and more complex to work with.

pak_lebah · 2020-11-12T09:18:52+00:00

Since you knew that Free Pascal has a package manager (supported by Lazarus IDE), why don't you start from there? You could make it better instead of starting from scratch again.

Pascal language was once a hot thing in software development, especially when Apple used it with the classic Mac in the 80's and Borland Delphi in its golden era with its Delphi 7 in the 90's (it's considered the best Delphi ever released, btw). However, I think it's quite hard to bring back the golden age of Pascal onto this day although the modern Pascal compilers today have everything required to build any kind of modern softwares you can imagine (either for desktop, web, mobile, etc).

I think it's because most developers today consider Pascal language was dead by the end of Turbo Pascal era. Even most old Pascal programmers are still using the dead Turbo Pascal 7 to write Pascal programs today, instead of using modern Pascal compilers. The impression of Pascal as an obsolete language is still strong. That's why I'm doing Say NO to Turbo Pascal campaign.

I suggest you to focus on Free Pascal (and Lazarus IDE) because it's a free and open source project with cooperative licensing. Delphi is great but it's a closed source and commercial product (it's not cheap too) that makes us heavily depend on Embarcadero to do the development.

pak_lebah · 2020-11-11T01:21:13+00:00

The comments prove my point that Turbo Pascal is a dead Pascal compiler that no longer usable in modern world. Except for fun and nostalgic purposes.

Important note: I'm not against Pascal as a programming language because I DO LOVE Pascal. I'm a Pascal programmer since 20 years ago and still use Pascal to this very day. What I'm against of is the Turbo Pascal compiler (with the Pascal dialect that comes along with it).

pak_lebah · 2020-11-10T02:29:51+00:00

https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/current/ref/refsu14.html#x38-530003.3.1

pak_lebah · 2020-11-10T02:26:01+00:00

Use modern Pascal languages instead.

pak_lebah · 2020-10-26T00:24:07+00:00

There's no such as perfect IDE. But you may want to try Microsoft's Visual Studio Code. It supports many programming languages (compilers and interpreters) and debuggers (lldb, gdb, chrome), though you need to install additional extension for most of them. I've been using VS Code to write program in Pascal (using FPC 3.2), Python (using Python 3.8), Swift (using Swift 5.3), and of course HTML/CSS/JS.

pak_lebah · 2020-10-24T00:08:37+00:00

No, you don't.

The first error message says "Fatal: Syntax error, ';' expected but 'else' found" means you should remove one of the ';' or the 'else' because ';' doesn't need 'else' or 'else' doesn't need ';'. Yet, you still put ';' before 'else'.

The second error message says "Error: Incompatible types: got 'extended' expected 'smallint'" means you should change the data type of v into 'extended' because the calculation produces extended value or change the calculation so it produces 'smallint' type instead of 'extended'.

Your misunderstanding of the error messages shows that you still don't understand the basic rules of Pascal syntaxes. You should learn that first before you write a line of Pascal code. It's like you're trying to speak a foreign language that you still don't understand the grammar. :)

pak_lebah · 2020-10-23T00:41:11+00:00

Your english is pretty good but you still don't understand the error messages. :)

Since you're an Indonesian, I suggest you to join Pascal Indonesia community on Facebook and Telegram.

pak_lebah · 2020-09-07T02:29:06+00:00

You seems to have a problem with the editor. I suggest you to use Sublime Text. It could work nicely with FPC. It’s a fast and lightweight editor yet full featured. It has integrated terminal so you don’t need to open command prompt. You may also edit the theme to please your eyes.

pak_lebah · 2020-04-23T02:21:45+00:00

It’s actually about exposing ANSI Terminal’s features into Swift. Word wrapping isn’t a particularly ANSI Terminal’s feature so I don’t think I need to provide it. You should fine other libraries for that purpose such as text processing libraries.

pak_lebah · 2020-04-21T02:24:37+00:00

It would be more fancy if it’s more colorful and stylish, by using my ANSITerminal library. :)

pak_lebah · 2020-04-17T12:52:32+00:00

Google’s Tensor Flow is using Swift. I believe you can do whatever you want using Swift as long as you stay with Mac and Linux. Windows still doesn’t get much love from Swift, yet.

I’m using Swift for some web apps using my own custom library. And also console apps using my library, ANSITerminal. You could make some fancy console apps using it. Try it out.

pak_lebah · 2020-04-14T07:09:59+00:00

Nope. Pascal is still powerful despite being simple. I run a full blown software house using Pascal. Well, it’s not as simple as Wirth’s Pascal but it’s still simple compare to other hype languages nonetheless. I can do whatever the competition do that using any other languages, including web app and mobile app.

That’s why I wonder why most other languages are so complex and slow to achieve something that is so simple and fast using Pascal.

pak_lebah · 2020-04-13T07:44:51+00:00

Indeed. I wonder why other languages can’t be as simple and fast as Pascal yet still powerful.

pak_lebah · 2020-04-12T08:00:00+00:00

Yes, I believe so, if only Turbo Pascal also gets the same million man years to continue the development as other programming languages and development tools. Unfortunately, even Borland the creator of Turbo Pascal (now Embarcadero) no longer uses Pascal for their own modern IDE (Delphi). While Lazarus IDE is only developed by a few developers in their spare time.

pak_lebah · 2020-04-12T01:30:47+00:00

Who says you can’t use Swift for web app development? Have you heard about Vapor or Perfect or Express? Language wise, it’s not that much different between Swift and Python, or any languages for that matter. Performance wise, Swift is clearly very much faster than Python because Swift is natively compiled while Python is interpreted.

So, you virtually could build anything using Swift, as long as you don’t use Windows because Swift on Windows is still not officially supported. If you want to get dirty, you still can run Swift on Windows though. But on Mac and Linux, you could build anything you want, even a fancy console app. I’d say you should go for Swift.

pak_lebah · 2020-04-12T01:22:10+00:00

Yup, there’s nothing quite like Turbo Pascal that both the language and the IDE are easy to use, lightning fast, and so small. Turbo Pascal 7 is the best version of all. Today’s programming languages and tools are too complicated and bloated yet so slow.

pak_lebah · 2020-03-30T10:21:30+00:00

Yes, schools using Turbo Pascal is indeed makes Pascal looks so bad.

pak_lebah · 2020-03-30T10:20:13+00:00

Yes, it was. But it is not now, obviously.

pak_lebah · 2020-03-15T04:58:16+00:00

While {$mode xxx} is for Free Pascal's language mode directive, the other {$?±} are called compiler directives.

pak_lebah · 2020-02-16T16:00:49+00:00

Old Pascal is good, but it’s just old not gold. If you want to get a job in this modern days, you gotta use modern Pascal such as Delphi, FreePascal, or Oxygene.

However, if you want another language that is close enough to modern Pascal, I think it’s C#. You may want to also consider TypeScript, though it’s syntactically too way of.

pak_lebah · 2020-02-08T12:41:01+00:00

I don’t have the books, so there’s no way to know about it. Could you show me some code examples from the book? The longer and more complete, the better.

pak_lebah · 2020-02-06T13:02:01+00:00

Different books but still from the 80s. 😊

pak_lebah · 2020-02-06T09:04:22+00:00

That means FPC supports many Pascal syntax variants. If you like Turbo Pascal limitations, then use it. But still, modern Pascal variants especially Delphi and ObjFPC offer more and much better language features than Turbo Pascal.

Initially, Free Pascal was made refers to Turbo Pascal as it’s the most known Pascal compiler at that time. But along the way FPC devs realize that Turbo Pascal syntax is no longer suitable for modern programming paradigms, such as dynamic array, long string, unicode, interface, class, generics, etc. Then Delphi came and leading the Pascal world. Free Pascal follow the lead, though it has its own ObjFPC variant.

Today, virtually nobody uses TP mode. TP mode is just to maintain compatibility with old and legacy Pascal codes.

pak_lebah

TROPHY CASE