GNU Pascal Compiler Released For Mac OS X

MacDaffy writes "Kudos to Adriaan Van Os: He has produced a 'second prerelease' of the GNU Pascal compiler for Mac OS X. Work actively proceeds on porting the Carbon Pascal Interfaces for use with it (longtime Macintosh Pascal guru Peter N Lewis has already gotten a great start on this). Thanks to Adriaan, Peter, and Bill Catambay of Pascal Central for helping take Pascal on Macintosh into the future."

What is really wrong with it?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is so wrong with Pascal, that it is not taken seriously as a language? I'm not a really a programmer, but I have written some small utilities in Delphi. It seems to work well for such things. I'm just curious as to why it is considered so bad.

Re:Why???

[Draoi]

I think that's stretching things a bit. Chances are, task X has been solved in C in the interim. Doing the recompile & fixing the glitches would probably take as long as re-coding it in C ...

Re:Why???

[jellomizer]

Well it really depends on what you wrote and how you written it. It may have just been a lot of math calculations and using mostly basic sections of language. Not every piece of code that people write are inteded to be sold to the public or even releaced it is just a custom tool for a custom job. There are no really interface advantages to it but they are there. There is actually a lot of time I wish I didn't loose some of my old code when I was in 6th grade, Becauce when I was younger I had more free time and came up with some interesting tools. Not I am usually burnt out at the end of the day and dont want to code anymore so if I could just easlly port over some of my code it makes my life easier.

Re:Why???

[WatertonMan]

Actually I loved Lightspeed Pascal which became Codewarrior. It was, at the time, light years ahead of any other development system, especially in its IDE.

MPW I never was able to get into. It had an odd mixture of editor/cli which I never liked. Further it lacked a lot of the nice debugging features that Lightspeed Pascal had. This was *way* back in the 68K days, mind you. Programming was a damn site easier then. Further the initial versions of C for the Mac required lots of resources and never were as nice as Pascal initially. Further even on the PC side Turbo Pascal (which became Delphi) was king.

Where Apple went wrong was never following Borland's lead and pushing their development system more towards RAD. That was true with C/C++. Indeed I think one of the reasons that Apple had troubles in the mid-90's was that it was so much easier to develop software on the PC than the Mac. As computers became more complex they retained the basic approach of the 80's. That's fine and even desirable for some applications. And they did have a framework for MPW and then there was PowerPlant for CodeWarrior. But neither really addressed people who weren't trying to write an application they wanted fine control over. There never was a Delphi for the Mac.

Now we have Interface Builder and Obj-C. However I still think, as nice as those are, that Microsoft with C# and Borland with Delphi/C++ Builder have better RAD tools.

Pascal *sigh* the memories

[vasqzr]

Anyone NOT cut their teeth on a Tandy or IBM XT/AT, Turbo Pascal?

What was so great about TurboPascal?

The IDE. Pretty much the first hobbyist compiler package with an IDE. No more "exit editor, compile, get error, edit, compile, run" etc etc

Remember using it for demos? Compiled way faster and smaller than the C compilers did at the time.

Remember Turtle Graphics?

BGI?

Turbo Vision?

Remember using it for BBS doors? FOSSIL drivers?

Back in the early/mid-80's, when TurboPascal first came out, for $49, it rocked the world and made Borland in to a HUGE success.

Re:What is really wrong with it?

[Col Bat Guano]

Ada is also being ported to OS X, and can be viewed as an industrialised Pascal.
OO, multithreading, good support for low level access and interfacing to other languages.
It's a pretty easy step to translate Pascal code to Ada (can be done automatically).

Ada is certainly better than C for writing code; probably not as flexible as Objective-C.

Re:Make the OTHER switch

[RevAaron]

...and some of us hate C because it is the embodiment of excessive syntax, confusing idioms, and a notorious inease of use. Not all languages are easier to program at the expense of power. I can't say that I'm a huge fan of Pascal (not touched it in years), but C is pretty far down on the list of languages if I had to use only one for the rest of my life.

C has its place, to be sure. So does Pascal. Neither have much of a place in my toolbox for what I do.

Apple may have lost you as a programmer, and you seem to think that is a huge loss on Apple's part. What killer app did you bring to another platform that they missed out on?

Pascal is junk. Free software forever.

RTFA. The port is of GNU Pascal. Which is free software. It's sad to see so many oSs h4k3rz associate C so closeley with Free software that there is no room for any other languages.

What does C do that Pascal doesn't?