(I'll leave it to others to correct my Google Trends query to the proper search terms for Lisp variants -- or it could be that Lisp programmers tend not to Google their own language much :) )
Unfortunately, the company lost it's focus, they've tried to move to .net and the next few versions of the IDE were really buggy. The language also lagged behind C#/Java, they didn't add full Unicode support until 2009, for example.
Dang - should have held onto those manuals.
http://stackoverflow.com/tags/clipper/topusers
It's not as popular as VB6 ;-)
- Everything new that Pascal had (record file io, for example) were suboptimal. Everything useful in Pascal came from C (including loop controls).
- Useful things from C are bolted on Pascal in gross, inconsistent and ugly way. E.g. break; loop construct is a procedure! Lol, what?
Since Pascal lost, we gained buffer overflows exploits everywhere, thanks to a language that does not provide proper safer constructs coupled with bad developers everywhere.
Do you really need pointer arithmetic, null terminated strings and array downgrade to pointers for real work?
Because every other language in the planet is able to deliver real work without them. Even the ones that existed before C.
Skype was originally created in Delphi, before being ported to Qt.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/5/prweb8476410.htm
Pixel32 is done with FreePascal http://www.kanzelsberger.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Studio_Pro
Atmel AVR-Microcontrollers programmed in Pascal http://www.e-lab.de/index_en.html http://www.mikroe.com/eng/categories/view/2/compilers/
Should I keep posting examples?
Or for you is Pascal only the very first release of the standard, which was only planned for education purposes?
Most of other examples are about a thin layer of Pascal on top of (unsafe and non kosher) C.
Of course you have to write on top of C, because that is what, sadly most operating systems are still written today.
But even that is slowly changing, when we look at the way operating system development is evolving, with safe layers on mini kernels, like Google is doing with Android or Microsoft with WP/WindowsRT/Singularity.
Anyway, I am stopping here, as won't convince you of anything and you won't convince me.
Common Lisp's loop is a macro, Smalltalk's are method calls (with blocks), work fine.
That's not the case in Pascal though. Neither `for` nor `while` are procedures, as in C they're special forms of the language.
Why do you believe this to matter? Smalltalk's signaling and exception handling (both `catch` and `finally` equivalent) uses regular messages and blocks (with hooks into the interpreter obviously). What value do you see in making special syntax things which need not be so, ease of "optimizations" (such as compiling a block to a jump)?
It is sooo beautiful.
But, users are few, fragmentation is high (Borland Pascal/Delphi, Object Pascal, Component Pascal; Modula-2 and Modula-3; Oberon, Oberon-2, Oberon-07, Active Oberon, Zonnon). How the heck are you supposed to choose when all those languages taken together have probaby about user base as "large" as that of common lisp? Plus, Oberon webpages at ETH look like abandoned.