[GoLUG] The Case For Pascal, 55 Years On

[Steve Litt]

Interesting article: 

https://hackaday.com/2025/09/02/the-case-for-pascal-55-years-on/

My first programming job was with Whitesmith Pascal on a PDP-11 running
TSX on top of RT-11. A year later, I got Turbo Pascal for my Kaypro 2X
CPM Z80 computer, and at work I added Whitesmith C to my Whitesmith
Pascal. 

Pascal, especially early Turbo Pascal, was a pretty darn good language.
Although the syntax was a little less forgiving than that of C, Pascal
was easier to learn than C. And more to the point, Pascal was a
no-drama language: Arrays were arrays, not pointers. There was some
degree of array bounds checking. Programs written in Pascal had fewer
intermittents than those written in C.

Pascal is from a time before GUI, so there were few batteries included.
In those days though, it was easy and safe to write pretty much any
kind of program with Turbo Pascal, which even allowed writes to
specific memory locations (B800 comes to mind).

Over the years, other languages have encroached on Pascal's territory,
from all sides. Python is much quicker and easier. Go has GUI batteries
and other batteries built right in. Rust and Ada are safer. When you
get into bit twiddling, C is what you want. And often, you can
accomplish a big part of your job with Unix commands sort, grep, cut,
find and the like. 

But I think Pascal still has a niche in filters: Programs taking stdin,
transforming it, and sending it to stdout. Pascal is an order of
magnitude faster than Python, it's less error prone than C, and it's
easier than the modern, batteries included languages. Sure, Pascal
doesn't have Perl's spectacular regex, or Python's great string
handling functions, but it's not hard to program the subset of those
needed by the specific program.

I hope you enjoyed the article.

Steve

Steve Litt 
http://444domains.com