[Lazarus] Teaching Pascal at College

[Lars]

On Mon, October 17, 2016 3:48 am, Michael Schnell via Lazarus wrote:
> On 17.10.2016 11:07, Graeme Geldenhuys via Lazarus wrote:
>
>
>> YES ...YES...NO...
>>
>
> IMHO a personal POV that is not very helpful in a totally general
> discussion (please keep in mind that the intention of the OP to consider
> Pascal instead of C was to keep the students from running away too soon.
>

oberon/golang instead of C are some other options.  The issue with
standard pascal in place of C was that once you figured out the
limitations of the 255 length string and other standard pascal gotchyas,
you not only ran away from C, you also ran away from Pascal.

Apple tried to solve this by extending pascal, which defeated the purpose
of a standard pascal. It was no longer standard. This all written about by
Brian K in "what pascal is not my fav..."

And the story is not so much different today, we have several instances of
pascal floating about: delphi, fpc... and it gets worse: each release of
delphi, breaks the last version so you end up polluting your code with
IFDEF's and version checks, taking away from the actual program and
causign the programmer to be concerned about completely irrelevant details
that have nothing to do with high level abstract programming

Oberon was supposed to solve this by making a standard version of pascal
that was modern, but not calling it pascal since pascal had a bad
reputation. But oberon, sadly, has several versions of itself... active
oberon, object oberon, oberon 1 2 3 4 5... embedded oberon (oberon 7?) so
this "shit" is not much different than C++, excuse my french! As much as I
love all these programming languages we have to stop FORKING everything
and replacing it with a new incompatible version next year.

The time I waste converting old delphi 5 code to work in delphi berlin, or
converting turbopascal units that are really useful over to modern delphi,
is time wasted. I would rather have one language that remained the same
for 20 years and then changed only after 20 years. This seems to be
something that GOLang wants to do, stop making so many incompatible
changes.. We'll see.  Sometimes I just write code in Delphi 5 style and
don't use any other features, to make it portable everywhere.. since any
modern pascal compiler will compile delphi 5 code. The discipline of
sticking to one standards compliant code is difficult. That's what Plain C
is all about I guess, but then you end up wasting your life coding your
own memory allocations.