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gulmatan · Aug 18, 2006, 06:07 PM

Hi all,

I'm getting a hankering to flex my programming muscle again. Is there a Pascal Language Kit (compiler/editor/debugger/interpreter) for OS/X?

ghporter · Aug 18, 2006, 06:21 PM

Google is your friend. Here is FreePascal on the Macintosh. First hit, too.

OreoCookie · Aug 18, 2006, 07:17 PM

C is similar to Pascal, so why not learn C?

ghporter · Aug 18, 2006, 08:34 PM

Actually, C is only slightly similar to Pascal. Pascal was developed to teach programming, and still has some advantages over C for that-including strong typing, pointer management (it's hard to send a pointer into outer space with Pascal, but my C professor said "if you don't wind up seeing the copyright notice for the video card, you're not trying to use C pointers").

And it's elegant. Block style is enforced (and that makes for very readable code), and good old Turbo Pascal was very helpful in explaining what you did wrong when you coded a syntax error. Overall, it's a very nice language to get the programmer's mindset with.

OreoCookie · Aug 18, 2006, 08:41 PM

I used to know TurboPascal actually, the only real programming language I could write. I have written some basic C programs as well, but I would never claim I can program �… aaah, memories

OreoCookie · Aug 18, 2006, 08:41 PM

I used to know TurboPascal actually, the only real programming language I could write. I have written some basic C programs as well, but I would never claim I can program … aaah, memories

dimmer · Aug 21, 2006, 06:01 PM

C is warmed-over PDP-11 assembly, it's "similarity" to Pascal like donuts are similar to paving slabs (where Pascal is the donut, of course).

ghporter · Aug 21, 2006, 06:51 PM

I wouldn't say that, dimmer. C is an outgrowth of B, which is derived from A. All are more "mid level" languages, with C being the most user-friendly, closest-to-high-level of the bunch. It introduced a lot of stuff that you cannot do with assembler (ANY assembler) and a lot of stuff that made it easy to encapsulate arcane and difficult assembly steps into very simple routines.

Blowing off C is like saying Archimedes didn't do anything impressive in his whole life. It is similar to Pascal in block structure and capabilities; it "feels" like Pascal to me in some ways, though it is much more powerful-and dangerous.

CatOne · Aug 21, 2006, 08:20 PM

Originally Posted by ghporter

I wouldn't say that, dimmer. C is an outgrowth of B, which is derived from A. All are more "mid level" languages, with C being the most user-friendly, closest-to-high-level of the bunch. It introduced a lot of stuff that you cannot do with assembler (ANY assembler) and a lot of stuff that made it easy to encapsulate arcane and difficult assembly steps into very simple routines.

Blowing off C is like saying Archimedes didn't do anything impressive in his whole life. It is similar to Pascal in block structure and capabilities; it "feels" like Pascal to me in some ways, though it is much more powerful-and dangerous.

Hmmm.. history I'm unaware of. I've never heard of B and A as programming languages.

Anyway, sure C is great, and I'd agree it's way more useful to know today than Pascal (which has gone the way of the Dodo bird), but also programming is programming so high-level concepts are typically quite similar, even if syntax is quite different (as Pascal and C are).

msuper69 · Aug 21, 2006, 08:53 PM

Originally Posted by ghporter

... It introduced a lot of stuff that you cannot do with assembler (ANY assembler) and a lot of stuff that made it easy to encapsulate arcane and difficult assembly steps into very simple routines.

..

What is something that you can't do with assembly language (assembly language is assembled by the assembler, BTW)?

Judge_Fire · Aug 22, 2006, 12:44 AM

Ooh, memories - I actually earned my first programming money with Turbo Pascal.

Then again, after that I've probably blown that sum on all those Cocoa/Objective-C books gathering dust in my bookshelf...

gulmatan · Aug 22, 2006, 01:04 AM

Thanks! Just D/Led "FreePascal" and all dox. Now, do I just install it and it's ready to rtoll?

dimmer · Aug 22, 2006, 03:08 PM

What is something that you can't do with assembly language?
Technically, you should be able to do anything in assembly, but it takes longer and if you don't have good working practices it quickly becomes a "Write Only" language (impossible for anyone other than the author to debug, sometimes not even then).

I wouldn't say that, dimmer.
I know, I was having a little fun! C is usually referred to as a 2.5GL, with Pascal a 3GL. C has more and better structure than assembly, but is not as human readable as Pascal. To learn the concepts of good programming Pascal is better than C, but as was pointed out, Pascal isn't used much anywhere these days.

For the purposes of learning C and Objectionable C, the xCode software from Apple is free, modern and pretty good. Lots of free tutorials on the web as well.

Now, who wants to hear how much I dislike COBOL (COmplete BOLlox) and FORTRAN?

ghporter · Aug 22, 2006, 07:06 PM

CatOne, Bell Labs was responsible for a number of innovations, including lasers, the transistor and a few programming languages. C is the only one that escaped.

dimmer, you can indeed to ANYTHING with assembly language. But you can't necessarily do it easily or quickly, That's what C did-became the first "high level assembly language" in a sense.

And you can go ahead and dislike COBOL-at least it was something better than hand coding machine instructions, and thus a breakthrough. And FORTRAN is STILL used, though more as a sort of fill in between C (or C++) endplates.

Now, let's discuss the heritage and relative merits of Ada, shall we? Mwuaaaaaaa!

dimmer · Aug 22, 2006, 10:34 PM

Aida, surely? COBOL wasn't too bad, provided you were trying to do something it was suited for (Business Oriented, after all!), and the worst aspect of FORTRAN were the non-computer science engineers who programmed it--is this source code, or spaghetti?

Aida always struck me as kinda neat, as did Dylan, but C and it's offspring seem to have won the day. Are there any emergent languages that look to be taking hold? Other than the mish-mash of web stuff?

ghporter · Aug 23, 2006, 10:10 AM

Ada was monstrous! It has no basic I/O (as standardized) since it is supposed to be an embedded processor language, but DoD requirements for software made it mandatory to write stuff in Ada anyway. I had to deal with an app written for a GRiD laptop (an 80288-based machine) that was written in Ada-the overhead was stupid huge.

It doesn't take a computer scientist to write good code, but it DOES take someone with a logical thought process. Not all researchers are so equipped!

One of my classmates in college worked "updating" production code that had been written in FORTRAN-basically he rewrote these programs in C to make them work with then-modern compilers. Since this stuff was well-tested and tweaked, it was pretty straightforward for him.

What I'm seeing now is not so much a "mish mash" of languages but languages being used to their strengths, and then integrated into a whole. AJAX is one example, using a number of languages (and different technologies too) to produce interactive web pages that don't require reloads, yet update both the user screen AND the page's server. And it's simple too.

dimmer · Aug 23, 2006, 02:54 PM

Whoops, it is indeed Ada, not Aida, I got that wrong! You can almost always spot a bad thing when the government enforces it's use... I never had to program in that language, but on paper it looked reasonable.

As far as coding goes, yes, it's more innate skill and logic than anything else: there's nothing more fun than inheriting a program that's fully commented: with comments such as "What the <bleep> am I doing here?". Lovely!

I guess JAVA was going to be the next big thing in programming, but it's ended up somewhat niche. I moved out of programming before most of the web stuff came to fruition (yes, that old!) and I haven't got my mind around using the mix of languages in use for web programming today--someday, I'll need to check that out.