Holywar

The page is dedicated to list all possible pros (mostly) and cons of Pascal language (all kinds of pascal included).

Pascal has something of a stigma as an "educational, and therefore weak" language, but it has nothing in common with a real life.

If you're Pascal developer being involved into a next flame about Pascal language, you're encouraged to use the page.

Why do we use Pascal

(if you don't use (Object) Pascal, please don't edit the section)

Often programmers are free to choose their tools, especially then coding as a hobby (rather than for their living). Lots of Pascal programmers choose the language because of:

• modern Object Pascal is simply one of the most productive languages and it can be used for almost everything.
  • Projects using Lazarus
  • Applications Build With Delphi
• well structured modular language
• safe and clean syntax, great for team work
• fast compile-time
• Object Pascal have really nice oop/interfaces implementation

Q&A

Q: Why there're so many limitations on what expressions i can use in "for" and "while" operators?

A: to force you to create maintainable and readable code

Q: Pascal doesn't allow to specify complex types without intermediate types. I.e. "an array of pointers to a function that accepts 2 ints and returns a pointer to function that returns a float" <c> float (*(*a[10])(int, int))() </c>

A: Has it any advantage to define no intermediate type?

type
  TFloatRetFunc = function : single;
  TSomeArray = array [0..9] of function (a, b: Integer): TFloatRetFunc;

Advantages over C/C++

• no preprocessor (better code reading and understanding);
• no hardly readable and poorly debugged STL;
• compiler built-in string-type (string ShortString, AnsiString, WideString). As well as still available to use PChar;

see also

• Why use Pascal

From the Free Pascal wiki, page "Holywar", as it stood on 2020-07-26 after a change by Trev, out of the wiki's dump of 2024-05-26. Copyright stays with the author who wrote it, according to the old wiki's Licensing page. If you have concerns about this material, message the admin.