Before ranting at me, please listen. I'm not joking. The very name
"Pascal" is the problem.
I'm no casual user.
I'm programming since the mid 60's. The first language I learned was
Fortran, but as soon as I met a structured language, like Algol, I
adopted it immediately. I became a fan of Pascal (which is a close son
of Algol) when it became available.
I've been using for a long time Intel's PLM, which is a dialect of PL1
clearly akin to Pascal/Algol. When Delphi was available I was delighted
to be able to program in Pascal again.
I've always tried to keep abreast of what's happening, with my
preference for a well structured language as Pascal in the first place.
Nevertheless, when recently I started looking into Lazarus, I was
convinced that the Pascal provided from FPC was the standard
old-fashioned Pascal, and that the class handling and all the object
oriented stuff was coming from a Lazarus pre-processor. I was astonished
to discover that FPC was actually an objective Pascal, and that the
Lazarus layer was just addding IDE and LCL.
This is my point: if an interested user which tries to keep up to date
isn't aware that today's FPC isn't the old Pascal, what's the chance
that a less interested user knows it?
I saw some time ago the suggestion of changing Lazarus name. That's not
the problem. The problem is Pascal's name!
Keeping a name almost 40 years old makes you think that it's a 40 years
old thing.
Let's call it Object-Pascal, O-Pascal, Pascal++, PascalPlus, whatever
you want, and the chances that someone will stop and give a look will
increase thousandfold.
Then all the "Marketing" can take place. We may explain that Lazarus is
based on PascalPlus. We may tell C++ programmers to forget about writing
and maintaining header files. Tell them that they can assign a property
with an := sign instead of using a setProperty or getProperty procedure,
that if they count the number of -> they type in place of a single dot,
the extra typing of C++ more than offsets the Pascal typing, etc. etc.
But first of all let the name carry the message: what we're speaking of
is a modern object oriented language.
Keep in mind that this holds true even for Delphi: the name doesn't
carry the thing. And this may explain some of its difficulties. Some 6
years ago (in one of the brightest moments in Delphi diffusion) I was
developing a Delphi application, but I needed in short time a Windows NT
driver for a special device. I needed to handle a high-speed custom
serial communication board, with a special protocol. I submitted the
problem to an expert NT developer, and he tried to convince me that I
couldn't possibly get the performance I wanted with Delphi, and
suggested to switch to C++. In the discussion which followed, I realized
that he believed Delphi to be an interpreted language, sort of Visual
Basic, and that he had no idea that it was object Pascal. Just one case,
but significant.
I use FPC because Pascal was the language that the university theaches me.
Then I've worked in a lab with 2000-3000 lines of code, in Pascal, for
data acquisition. I've extended that code. Now the lab have
10000-15000 lines of code. They are Physicist, so for them Pascal is a
good language, not as obscure as C, but with the horse power to do low
level task (process control via homemade ISA cards ).
Then, linux came to the lab (1998,1999). We need remote control of the
lab (long experiments, 2-3 weeks long, required monitoring in holydays
and weekends), and only linux could gives us the reliability and the
net support that we needed.
FreePascal was the only compiler to give us:
- 99% compatibility with existent code (the 1% remaining was due to
bad coding practices)
- Linux support
- High level language and low level hardware access
- GPL
So, we choose FPC because it is multiplatform, something that became
THE ONLY VALUABLE WAY TO WRITE CODE, and because it is free as in
speech.
To me, the old discussion about "obsoleteness" of Pascal is pointless.
Maybe Pascal, and its best compiler, FPC, is years ahead of its time !
Gustavo
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