What People Have to Say about Pascal

Pascal is an expressive and notably modern language whose structure and syntax make the developer's intent clear, producing highly maintainable code. These are the hallmarks of a great language.

Cary Jensen

Blaise Pascal invented the first mechanical calculator in 1642. I see him as the founder of the modern computer. Niklaus Wirth designed a programming language in the 1970s to help him teach good programming principles to his students. Pascal has not been outdone in its clear logical syntax as an educational development language, nor in its ease of parsing and consequent rapid compilation speed. It's very much alive and I think it will survive most of all other languages. It is evolving very fast to become a language for multiple OSs. It is way ahead of many languages because of Wirth's original language design skill, and his aversion to complexity. Pascal is simple to use and understand for people of all ages...

Detlef D. Overbeek,
Chairman ProPascal Foundation

Many in the IT industry make draconian assumptions about computer languages and the values they can offer to the industry at large. Languages like COBOL, xBASE and Object Pascal provide a maturity, innovation and understanding that new languages only bring to the table after a very long time. The unspoken truths about these languages are that they still run millions upon millions of mission-critical applications every single day, week, month, and year and do it with incredible return-on-investment. When was the last time a new language had an application running in production for over 20 or more years, delivering results, and is still viable today… oh that’s right, it’s a new language, we will have to wait 20 years to see if it is still valuable.

Mike Rozlog,
President and CEO of dBase, LLC.

Object Pascal is a naturally expressive language that does not rely on overloaded symbols, excessive directives, or arcane syntax. Nor does Object Pascal require a specialized editor in order to fully appreciate the coding structure. Object Pascal has a long history, but it is by no means antiquated. Object Pascal is a modern object-oriented programming language supporting the latest programming constructs including generics, anonymous methods, interfaces, properties, events, etc. I continue to use Object Pascal because it allows me to accomplish my programming tasks faster and easier than any other language.

Ray Konopka,
Raize Software

I learnt UCSD Pascal at University, as many others did, back in the days when Pascal was a teaching language. When I joined Borland at the start of the 90s and saw how they had brought the language forward so naturally in Turbo Pascal to enable the same results as from those using C (and later C++), I was completely hooked. I like working with many programming languages, but some I find more obtuse to read (notably C-based languages) and some are very much easier on the eye and easier on the fingers (such as Object Pascal). Borland (and then Embarcadero) continued to extend the language as found in Delphi for many years and RemObjects have done even more with Oxygene to add in all the features and facilities found in a good array of modern programming languages. I'm still delighted to be an Object Pascal programmer!"

- Brian Long

The Pascal language has lived well beyond it's original purpose. It has grown from an experiment to a teaching language to a world class compileable language for professional software. That was even before Object Pascal.

Object Pascal modernized the way everyone programs today. It's the unsung hero of software development. Apple chose the Pascal dialect to create the first version of an object oriented programming because they knew it would take the best from both worlds. Object Pascal is probably the only programming language out there that is as readable and friendly to work with.

It was the work that Borland did with Delphi based around Apple's original Object Pascal dialect that inspired the creation of C#. And beyond that, with Oxygene and other variations on the Borland dialect it continues to grow and has proven to be very adaptable to many applications.

In my time in the community I've seen Object Pascal migrate to at least over 9 or more various native and runtime platforms through commercial and open source tools and projects. Those platforms are: Nintendo's GameBoy Advance, Nintendo DS, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, Java-bytecode/RTE, HTML5, Win64 and full .NET implementation. I expect to see it continue to grow as the following generation of operating systems and mobile devices increase.

It was an open source Object Pascal compiler and not an open source C compiler that was the first to fully incorporate Intel's 64-bit instructions. That work was of course done with the Free Pascal compiler.

For games development, I can think of no other language that will get you on so many platforms from a single code-base. Just about every commercial and open source platform is covered by one Object Pascal compiler or another. Object Pascal compilers can take full advantage of all the major game libraries out there, only it will do so on as many platforms as that library will allow, unlike a lot of other language tools.

Object Pascal is still a great language to teach kids in high school and even university, only now they don't have to learn a new language just to do serious software development when they enter the industry. The only thing that can make Object Pascal better, is to get it on the rest of the platforms. Basically gaming consoles. PlayStation, XBox, Nintendo and of course OUYA.

Not sure what else I can say about such a great programming language other than I will continue to use it in all my development as much as I can so long as the community supports it. And what a brilliant stubborn bunch we are, so I doubt that its time will ever be up.

Jason McMillen,
Editor in Chief, Pascal Gamer Magazine