I learned Pascal in high school, too. On a 25 MHz 486 with 8 MB of RAM -- woo!

I actually quite liked it. I thought Pascal provided the right level of hand-holding necessary for a newbie programmer. I was probably able to pick up C more quickly the next year because of the solid foundation from Pascal.

Pascal is unnecessary verbose, even in its own family. Even Modula-2, where the most prominent change that is immediately visible is that you don't have to say "begin" so many times, is noticeably better.

It's really too bad about Modula-2. It was a very nice language, comparatively speaking, and it should have been what Pascal eventually became through its dialects (notably Apple's and Borland's).

Did you ever look at Oberon?

It's what Pascal should have become IMHO. Base syntax: case-insensitive Oberon. Extensions: Object Pascal features. Now that's heaven. If only we don't need to maintain backward compatibility...

I wonder how hard it would be to poach the best parts of the GUI system from Lazarus and put it into a Turbo Oberon system.

Oberon is also nice!

Modula-2, though, has a nice trait in that it has exactly the feature set necessary for "better C", and nothing more.

Is interesting that people that "like" the c-like syntax consider pascal "ugly". The opposite is also true.

I've used both professionally. I'd say that "begin" and "end" may be clearer than "{" and "}", but less typing wins when you're writing a lot of code.

Writing "if" statements without short-circuit operators is both tedious and error-prone.

So, yeah, I like the C syntax. It's not a question of "ugly", though. Pascal is tedious. It's more work to write. And, of the kinds of tedious I've complained about here, it's not tedious in a way that gets you more correct code. It's just tedious in a way that takes effort and saps your energy for stuff that doesn't matter.

> Writing "if" statements without short-circuit operators is both tedious and error-prone.

By default both Delphi and Free Pascal perform short-circuit evaluation of boolean operators. The Delphi and Free Pascal documentation has more:

http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Berlin/en/Boolean_s...

http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Berlin/en/Expressio...

http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/current/ref/refsu48.html...

Ah. When I used Pascal, it was back in the old days. The single most horrific problem was that the size of an array was part of the type of the array, so it was literally impossible to use variable-sized arrays. But I didn't whine about that one, because I knew that it was fixed as early as Turbo Pascal.

grumble grumble kids get off my lawn...

I think this is an important point - I had a year of Object Pascal as introductory programming by accident sort of - as I spent a year at another college. It was the last year they continued to use Object Pascal (moving on to Java, I believe). Having had some exposure to Java, C and assembler before - I felt Object Pascal made much more sense than C. Meaningfully higher level than assembly, and much easier to grasp the difference between reference/value/address than in C. I know what * and & means in C, but it just felt more natural in Pascal (it's been so long that I don't remember the particularity of the syntax/semantics ...).

Basic "original" Pascal is very much a teaching language first, and a "real" language second. But the small tweaks (or big, depending on your point of view) to Object Pascal/the default dialect for Free Pascal makes a world of difference IMNHO. So, I think someone can both agree that early Pascal (or plain Pascal) is uncomfortably verbose and rigid, while at the same time think that modern Free/Object Pascal is a great language to work with.

I wonder if there's anyone working on a Pascal back-end for Nim? In some ways is seems like a "waste" that the default target is C.

> less typing wins when you're writing a lot of code.

This probably is part of the reasons: People that optimize for write instead of reading.

However, after python I consider "begin/end" marks redundant with indentation...

But then some people hate clear code, and prefer mess with the layout!

Ruby seems to be quoted as an elegant language, and it certainly has its followers, and the number of Ends (vs. Begins in Pascal) are just as numerous, yet this is never cited.

Syntax is definitely a personal preference. I know multiple PLs from different families, and even then, I still prefer a certain syntax.

> Ruby seems to be quoted as an elegant language, and it certainly has its followers, and the number of Ends (vs. Begins in Pascal) are just as numerous, yet this is never cited.

Well, except that the cascade of ends is a frequent complaint about Ruby, rather than something "never cited".

It's true. I view syntax preference kind of like car preference. Very personal and some people have deep reasons and others don't.