Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language (1981)

I was already familiar with this rant back in the day. It complains about the first Pascal version, not the later Extend Pascal standard. All the Pascal compilers target to professional developers had a common set of extensions mainly from USCD Pascal and Object Pascal (Apple), with Turbo Pascal being the one most compilers tried to be the most compatible with. C was also a mess outside UNIX with compilers only partially supporting parts of it. Worse, thanks to C…

This article pops up every now and again. Most of the criticisms are no longer valid. Pascal has moved on in the last 38 years. If you don't know modern Pascal then check out Free Pascal, Lazarus, and Delphi: https://www.freepascal.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi (And Delphi documentation at http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/ )

Very strong feeling of deja vu: I read this in the early 1980s, uplifting my career from a Pascal based university course (York) to life as a systems programmer in networking using v7 on pdp11, and 4.1BSD on Vaxes and subsequently 4.2 re-reading it, I suggest he made one strong statement I'd say more weakly: saying there is no type cast/overloading but there is of a (bad) kind: you can use union types (variant records) to do this, if the…

A lot of these things have long since been addressed in the last 40 years. Delphi (https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi) and Free Pascal (https://www.freepascal.org/) are the major Pascal implementations.