Greetings,
I follow the postings on the mailing list with interest but seldom feel that I have anything to contribute. I am becoming concerned that some fundamental questions that we ought to address are simply being ignored. The most important question is Is Pascal a dead language? This might look like flame bait, but it isn't. Evidently the development of GPC presents a variety of interesting technical problems in the construction of a portable compiler, but the solution of such problems, though interesting in itself, deteriorates into navel-gazing if there isn't a group of users, reasonably sophisticated programmers who use write programs in Pascal. While there is a cohort of people like me who learnt Pascal in the '70s and '80s, the language is no longer taught in the introductory courses in programming at Aberdeen University of which I am a member, and as far as I can discover it certainly is not taught at school. With the decreasing number of recruits to the population of Pascal programmers it seems to me that Pascal is dying out and there is little anybody can do to conserve it. Perhaps my perceptions are mistaken, perhaps there is still a thriving process of recruitment to the ALGOL tradition, but I fear that the recruitment is not happening in Britain and certainly not in America.
I belong to a fortunate group of programmers, those whose first language was ALGOL 60, trapped for a while with FORTRAN 4---What a dog's dinner after ALGOL!--- forced on to PL/1---a dog's banquet after FORTRAN---starvation rations then with BASIC, then the revelation of Pascal, which I started to use in 1978 and have used ever since as my favoured language, currently using GPC under linux.
My programming is entirely scientific, simulating dynamical systems of interacting animals. I have no interest in GUIs and all my programs work from the command line. With a colleague I used to teach an introductory programming course for students with an interest in ecological modelling, using Level 0 ISO Pascal. Now, I believe introductory courses are taught using Visual BASIC or Java, neither of which, it seems to me, have the elegance and security of Pascal. So the base of users in my immediate vicinity is shrinking year by year, and to my eyes the quality of programs written by graduate students and postdocs is much worse now than it was when Pascal was the first language learnt. After all when you have learnt how to program in Pascal, you can write Pascal in any language, even PERL.
So the question is Where is Pascal taught and used? I don't think that it's in computing science departments: my contact with computer scientists suggests that they regard themselves as far too grand for code-bashing. I suspect that the language is primarily used by what we might call gentleman-programmers, people who need fairly elaborate programs for their work that don't fit easily into the Mathematica, Matlab, systems, but which, for all that, require fairly sophisticated number crunching. Typically such programs are used by the programmers who write them, and so there is little need for fancy user (noddy) friendly interfaces.
So who uses Pascal now? Who teaches Pascal now? Anybody interested in discussing these matters?
John O.
On 31 Mar 2005 at 7:40, John Ollason wrote:
Greetings,
I follow the postings on the mailing list with interest but seldom feel that I have anything to contribute. I am becoming concerned that some fundamental questions that we ought to address are simply being ignored. The most important question is Is Pascal a dead language?
[...] Go here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2435 and look at the number of downloads of gpc (for Win32), and compare with with the downloads of gcc on the same page. Furthermore, go to the Delphi newsgroups and see what is happening there.
Pascal is far from a dying language, even if no-one is teaching it in school (I didn't learn it in school, but am rather self taught - and so are the vast majority of Delphi/BP programmers that I know). If Pascal was a dying language, I doubt that Borland would expend enormous resources in continuing to develop Delphi.
Best regards, The Chief -------- Prof. Abimbola A. Olowofoyeku (The African Chief) web: http://www.greatchief.plus.com/
On Thu, 31 Mar 2005, Prof A Olowofoyeku (The African Chief) wrote:
On 31 Mar 2005 at 7:40, John Ollason wrote:
Greetings,
I follow the postings on the mailing list with interest but seldom feel that I have anything to contribute. I am becoming concerned that some fundamental questions that we ought to address are simply being ignored. The most important question is Is Pascal a dead language?
[...] Go here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2435 and look at the number of downloads of gpc (for Win32), and compare with with the downloads of gcc on the same page. Furthermore, go to the Delphi newsgroups and see what is happening there.
Pascal is far from a dying language, even if no-one is teaching it in school (I didn't learn it in school, but am rather self taught - and so are the vast majority of Delphi/BP programmers that I know). If Pascal was a dying language, I doubt that Borland would expend enormous resources in continuing to develop Delphi.
Perhaps I am over-pessimistic, and would be pleased to be proved wrong. I get ground down by the triumphalism of the C tradition, and its developments. I have the feeling that the rise of the object-oriented extensions to the C tradition of programming is to a great extent a work-around for the lack of real block-structuring in C and the languages that derive from it, and is largely unnecessary for Pascal, but this could just be a habitual structured-programmer's conservatism.
John O.
On 31 Mar 2005 at 9:34, John Ollason wrote:
[...]
Pascal is far from a dying language, even if no-one is teaching it in school (I didn't learn it in school, but am rather self taught - and so are the vast majority of Delphi/BP programmers that I know). If Pascal was a dying language, I doubt that Borland would expend enormous resources in continuing to develop Delphi.
Perhaps I am over-pessimistic, and would be pleased to be proved wrong. I get ground down by the triumphalism of the C tradition, and its developments. I have the feeling that the rise of the object-oriented extensions to the C tradition of programming is to a great extent a work-around for the lack of real block-structuring in C and the languages that derive from it, and is largely unnecessary for Pascal, but this could just be a habitual structured-programmer's conservatism.
Remember that Pascal has also had OOP for a very long time. I think that event-driven programming would be quite hard (if not impossible) without OOP.
Best regards, The Chief -------- Prof. Abimbola A. Olowofoyeku (The African Chief) web: http://www.greatchief.plus.com/
On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 09:37:59AM +0100, Prof A Olowofoyeku (The African Chief) wrote:
On 31 Mar 2005 at 9:34, John Ollason wrote:
Remember that Pascal has also had OOP for a very long time. I think that event-driven programming would be quite hard (if not impossible) without OOP.
In fact, for many years, the Apple Macintosh operating systems were mostly written in Pascal (until they switched to (Objective) C). The first extensions to Pascal including objects were driven by Apple. Not only for GUI matters, but for many other OS-based services.
Delphi programmers are still in demand; there are still many real products developed in Delphi. Unfortunately, the preceding sentence shows that the word Pascal need not be used. Even Borland avoids using the word Pascal (presumably because it sounds old-fashioned).
Tom
Am 31.03.2005 um 15:59 schrieb Tom Verhoeff:
In fact, for many years, the Apple Macintosh operating systems were mostly written in Pascal (until they switched to (Objective) C). The first extensions to Pascal including objects were driven by Apple.
Yes, I remember fondly. I learned OO with Object Pascal and Lightspeed Pascal ;)
Alex
Here are my reasons for trying to become competent in Pascal.
Again, I'm an old Biophysicist living northern Minnesota. My undergrad was neurophysiology. About 1980 I saw AT&T was interested in fiber-optics. There were many different computing systems around the labs I worked in, from huge to self-made from chips. Libraries were hard to use, and the books were heavy and expensive. So I pushed a fiber-optic "super-network" because "super-computers" were the buzzword. Otto Schmitt filled in that fiber-optics were immune from EMPs (electro-magnetic pulses) from nuclear explosions. The internet really was created for the event of nuclear war. Instead it was the greatest instrument of peace and harmony since the Beatles. Networking protocols were as new as integrated circuits. Everybody was "flying by the seat of his pants."
Energy and environment are issues we now all face. I live near Duluth, Minnesota; the geographic center of North America and farthest inland port. Pascal is the best language for low level instrumentation development. And politics is still rotten.
Other language are good for other things.( I particularly like TCL.) But I have seen nothing close to improving on Pascal for instrumentation.
We do at our research group.
Our in-house finite element code is basically a collection of routines that support our research. It is written in pascal, and amounts to more than 4 MB.
bash-3.00$ find * -name *.[ph] | xargs wc < A lot of details on the files which I excluded > 151697 477333 4483697 total
Of course, I am not able to oversee everything, so I expect some redundancy.
Regards,
Marten Jan
Yesterday I set up my neighbors with RH9 Linux. They are grandparents fed up with MSWindows. They are trying to keep in touch with kids and grandkids, but their P4 Dell has slowed to a crawl with spyware. One son was US Air Force "Doctor Of The Year" a year or two ago. I know the Doctor son learned Pascal at the USAF Academy, because I got his copy of TP4.
I haven't yet started the neighbor grandma on Pascal. But people have renewed interest.
Am 31.03.2005 um 08:40 schrieb John Ollason:
So who uses Pascal now? Who teaches Pascal now? Anybody interested in discussing these matters?
A number of German Highschools use Borland Turbo Pascal in their Programming classes. My only interest in Pascal is helping students who run Mac OS X or Linux to learn and work without using Windows and the Borland compiler.
I maintain a little article (in German) at: http://macentwicklerwelt.net/index.php?title=Leben_ohne_TurboPascal
Feedback on this site is welcomed, and if you are interested in an English article please let me know as well.
Hope this info helps
Alex
John Ollason wrote:
Greetings,
I follow the postings on the mailing list with interest but seldom feel that I have anything to contribute. I am becoming concerned that some fundamental questions that we ought to address are simply being ignored. The most important question is Is Pascal a dead language? This might look like flame bait, but it isn't. Evidently the development of GPC presents a variety of interesting technical problems in the construction of a portable compiler, but the solution of such problems, though interesting in itself, deteriorates into navel-gazing if there isn't a group of users, reasonably sophisticated programmers who use write programs in Pascal. While there is a cohort of people like me who learnt Pascal in the '70s and '80s, the language is no longer taught in the introductory courses in programming at Aberdeen University of which I am a member, and as far as I can discover it certainly is not taught at school. With the decreasing number of recruits to the population of Pascal programmers it seems to me that Pascal is dying out and there is little anybody can do to conserve it. Perhaps my perceptions are mistaken, perhaps there is still a thriving process of recruitment to the ALGOL tradition, but I fear that the recruitment is not happening in Britain and certainly not in America.
Everything you say is true. And my recommendations are risky for you.
I'm a Biophysicist. I studied under Otto Schmitt (Schmitt trigger) who modeled digital electronics from nerve cell electronics. So I go way back. Otto was a rather poor, lonely man (but always delighfully full of new ideas).
You are seeing the same thing I see here in Minnesota, USA. The herd has not followed Pascal. The herd goes to the mall with a credit card.
It is simply a choice one makes; follow the herd, or follow your beliefs. The rare period of scientific enlightenment we witnessed is under great challenge. In the US, evolution can't be safely taught. Now nuclear is pronounced "nucular." Being out of the herd is costly. I live in the north Minnesota countryside. Usually I can barely hear the birds sing because the gun carrying pick-up trucks are blasting away. My oldest daughter is finishing college in (and loves) England. My second daughter will study next year in Hong Kong. My youngest daughter will study next year in Spain. This group (GPC) represents people from around the globe. You are right to fear being trampled by the herd.
On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 07:40:32AM +0100, John Ollason wrote:
So who uses Pascal now? Who teaches Pascal now? Anybody interested in discussing these matters?
Most languages are bound to die out, or get transformed so much that they are no longer comparable to their ancestors.
I still teach (Object) Pascal in our introductory programming courses for Computer Science students at Eindhoven University of Technology. But I must admit that there is much pressure to move to e.g. Java (which seems to be the language of choice for teaching programming basics to students of other departments; with an exception that Mechanical Engineering here has opted for Python).
Our students use Delphi with Object Pascal (we have a campus license), but our automatic checker http://peach.win.tue.nl/ uses FreePascal (in Delphi mode).
I myself have been using gpc for some scientific projects (e.g. solving the game of Yahtzee: http://www.win.tue.nl/~wstomv/misc/yahtzee/).
Pascal is also still used in the International Olympiad of Informatics http://olympiads.win.tue.nl/ioi/ (next to C and C++; no Java there, yet). It must be noted that the percentage of Pascal users is significantly higher among the top scoring contestants. Especially in Central and Eastern Europe, Pascal is still the favorite language, and particularly so for contests (precisely because it offers more protection against mistakes).
But I must admit that there is much pressure to move to e.g. Java, both in our institute and in the olympiad. The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest for university students has recently abandonned Pascal (to the chagrin of some; they allow C, C++, Java).
Personally, I don't feel that Java is a better choice than Pascal. My colleagues sometimes agree, but then counter that Java is more useful for a student's career, and that it is more "mainstream" (i.e. more generally known, so better as a common language to exchange ideas, and there are more tools, books, etc. to support the use and teaching of the language).
On the other hand, I also feel that Pascal has a number of shortcomings, which are hard to get rid of.
So far my musings,
Tom
Hello John,
JO> Now, I believe introductory courses are taught using > Visual BASIC or Java
That's certainly true at the college that I currently attend (Prairie State College, Illinois, USA).
JO> So the question is Where is Pascal taught and used? > ...who uses Pascal now?
No idea where it's taught, but I have just started experimenting with Pascal for CGI programming. It seems likely that I will use it increasingly as I gain more practice.
- Andy Ball
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Alex v.Below -
Andy Ball -
John Ollason -
Marten Jan de Ruiter -
Prof A Olowofoyeku (The African Chief) -
Rick Engebretson -
Tom Verhoeff