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points

by Agingcoder105 days ago |

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by nl95 days ago|

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> Pascal is not a low level language - quite the opposite.

Why do you say that?

Back in the 80s and early 90s it was the primary competitor to C, and in an alternate universe we might have ended up using Pascal decedents instead of C decedents.

For example the original Mac Toolbox was first written in Pascal: https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Macintosh_Toolbox

The original Mac API were all native Pascal: https://wiki.freepascal.org/Basic_Pascal_Tutorial/History

by mustntmumble95 days ago|

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I learned to program in VAX Pascal, and didn't learn VAX C until later. I always found Pascal more intuitive, especially for string handling than C, and combined with the VAX/VMS System library and Runtime Libraries was able to build quite complex systems in Pascal. I found out later, after I joined DEC, that VAX Pascal was a popular Systems Programming language for a while.

by revanx_95 days ago|

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You are wrong, Pascal has always allowed pure raw pointer and data manipulation as well as self memory management, the strong type enforcement and auto management for some types (strings, dynamic arrays) is just on the surface so you don't shoot yourself in the foot but it never stops you from doing any low level programming.

by int_19h95 days ago|

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The problem with Ada is tooling other than the compiler. Last I checked, GnatStudio still doesn't work well on Apple Silicon, for example, and VSCode support was decidedly meh.

With Free Pascal, though, you get a TUI IDE working basically everywhere, plus Lazarus across all major desktop platforms.

by fuzztester104 days ago|

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In what way is the OO part a bit odd?

by Agingcoder104 days ago|

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The way you express it is different from most other languages I’ve come across. It doesn’t make it bad in any way ( I’ve written Ada professionally), just unusual. Basically Ada already provides natively substantial capabilities relative to encapsulation, modularities, generics etc but in a procedural context. The designers bolted on OO facilities on top of said existing mechanisms.

While it may look reasonably clean in the link below, I’ve always found it integrates badly with an existing codebase, the primary problem being that the ‘boundaries’ of the objects are not clearly visible.

https://learn.adacore.com/courses/Ada_For_The_CPP_Java_Devel...

I will add that the existing non oo features are excellent and I would even argue that in many cases you don’t need OO.

by fuzztester104 days ago|

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Thanks.

>I will add that the existing non oo features are excellent and I would even argue that in many cases you don’t need OO.

Somewhat the same in Python, because of the built-in data structures such as lists, dicts and sets, and the ability to compose them.