[Lazarus] Teaching Pascal at College

[Mehmet Erol Sanliturk]

On Thu, Oct 13, 2016 at 3:02 AM, Graeme Geldenhuys via Lazarus <
lazarus at lists.lazarus-ide.org> wrote:

> On 2016-10-13 10:04, Michael Schnell via Lazarus wrote:
> > IMHO it's a shame, but new
> > projects in Pascal seem to be declining,
>
> That's got nothing to do with the Object Pascal being modern or not (I
> think it is modern enough). The decline is about marketing and
> popularity contests, and management decisions (how easy is it to replace
> a Object Pascal developers vs a Java developer).
>
> Delphi being sold every other year doesn't help with the stability of
> Object Pascal in the marketplace either.
>
> Regards,
>   Graeme
>
> --
> _______________________________________________
>



Free Pascal is a "Turing complete" and "Resource complete" language , means
it is not "lower" than any other programming language whatever it is .

The unfortunate situation is that Free Pascal ( and  Lazarus ) is alone ,
i.e., there is no any other competing compiler production SIMILAR to Free
Pascal . Also Free Pascal is a voluntary project means the developers can
not devote their times solely to develop ( maintain ) the Free Pascal
because they a "life" to pursue .

In a commercial environment such a structure can not be used for a "life
critical" component as used "programming language" , because there is no
any alternative . Delphi can not be considered as an alternative due to
reasons about their development and maintenance policies and it is also
"monopoly" naturally because there is no any alternative SIMILAR compiler .


I am using Free Pascal . I have abandoned Delphi , I did not buy a new
version of it because it is for only a single operating system . Now , I
will convert my program to C ( around 12 000 procedures ) where there is no
any converter which can convert such a program . In that respect , I
consider my program ( about data base programming language and interpreter
) as went into nearly scratch .


Main reason is that in such a program generated code is correct but when an
error is occurring it is not possible to its place or reason of it .
Debugging tools are useless because they are very difficult to use .


As a result , Pascal is a dead language , but a very useful and nice
language to teach programming concepts . For small problems it is very good
, but now , problem definitions started to become very complex . When a
problem tends to be very large , Pascal is losing its power because of its
non-standard ( actually related standards are dead and not maintained and
not adhered ) structure .


Mehmet Erol Sanliturk
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lazarus-ide.org/pipermail/lazarus/attachments/20161013/2a88e2ec/attachment.html>