Pascal was designed in 1970 by Nicklaus Wirth to impose programmers a structured programming style. Pascal has successors, Modula and Oberon, which add module and access to system resources. But because these features has been added to Pascal itself by implementors, mainly Borland, the successors have not succeded. Pascal is used to teach programming. The main commercial port is Delphi, followed by Kylix.
Features
- strictly structured programming.
- imports allows including functions from external modules, with no headers required as in C.
- procedures and functions, the formers returning values.
- objects added further.
Why use Pascal?
It is often used for teaching. This is a classical language (more is not possible) that imposes a rigourous programming. The Delphi version is a specialized client-server programming tool and its IDE allows to build easily applications
Sites and tools
An object oriented port of Pascal, near the Turbo Pascal 7 from Borland. Free and open source.
Another open source compiler.
Resources.
- Kylix. Cross-platform IDE.
Sample code
Merging and displaying lists.
cont str = 'demo'; var i:int; len:int; begin len:= length(str); for i:=0 to len do begin write(str[i]); end; end;