Pascal - Structured programs
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 to 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
- Turbo Pascal
The old 5.5 version is available freely. (Win) - Turbo
Delphi
Visual development environment by Borland. Free to build commercial products. - Free Pascal
An object oriented port of Pascal, near the Turbo Pascal 7 from Borland. Free and open source. - GNU Pascal
Another open source compiler. - Pascal Central
Resources.
Sample code
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Merging and displaying lists
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cont str = 'demo';
var i:int; len:int;
begin
len:= length(str);
for i:=0 to len do
begin
write(str[i]);
end;
end;
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