I shall begin by thanking all the people who have contributed to GPC which
I have used as my programming language of choice for
algorithms since I moved to Linux Red Hat Version 5.2.
I am now retired and apart from the occasional recreational programming, a
couple of years ago I wrote a Sudoku solver when I was annoyed that I
couldn't solve a particular grid, I very seldom need a Pascal compiler. I
was an ALGOL 60 programmer before I became a Pascal programmer, and then,
when I had to learn C I was horrified by the ad hoc nature of the
language. But ad hoc seems to be the favoured strategy of the time, and as
far as I know very few people learn Pascal now, and therefore the base of
users is ageing.
Without a thriving population of young programmers the language will die,
and I suspect that the formal virtues of a language in the ALGOL tradition
are not being transmitted, and perhaps new programmers are not being
equipped to recognize the admirable qualities of Pascal.
I suggest, therefore, that no substantial development of GPC would be cost
effective unless there were a large base of users of the language, and
that the first priority should be to determine the number of current users
of the language and to estimate its expected future use. My own
pessimistic assessment may be mistaken; I hope it is, but it would make
sense to find out before committing a substantial amount of effort in
further development of a language that is only used by a small minority of
programmers.
John O.
