Greetings,
I follow the postings on the mailing list with interest but seldom feel that I have anything to contribute. I am becoming concerned that some fundamental questions that we ought to address are simply being ignored. The most important question is Is Pascal a dead language? This might look like flame bait, but it isn't. Evidently the development of GPC presents a variety of interesting technical problems in the construction of a portable compiler, but the solution of such problems, though interesting in itself, deteriorates into navel-gazing if there isn't a group of users, reasonably sophisticated programmers who use write programs in Pascal. While there is a cohort of people like me who learnt Pascal in the '70s and '80s, the language is no longer taught in the introductory courses in programming at Aberdeen University of which I am a member, and as far as I can discover it certainly is not taught at school. With the decreasing number of recruits to the population of Pascal programmers it seems to me that Pascal is dying out and there is little anybody can do to conserve it. Perhaps my perceptions are mistaken, perhaps there is still a thriving process of recruitment to the ALGOL tradition, but I fear that the recruitment is not happening in Britain and certainly not in America.
I belong to a fortunate group of programmers, those whose first language was ALGOL 60, trapped for a while with FORTRAN 4---What a dog's dinner after ALGOL!--- forced on to PL/1---a dog's banquet after FORTRAN---starvation rations then with BASIC, then the revelation of Pascal, which I started to use in 1978 and have used ever since as my favoured language, currently using GPC under linux.
My programming is entirely scientific, simulating dynamical systems of interacting animals. I have no interest in GUIs and all my programs work from the command line. With a colleague I used to teach an introductory programming course for students with an interest in ecological modelling, using Level 0 ISO Pascal. Now, I believe introductory courses are taught using Visual BASIC or Java, neither of which, it seems to me, have the elegance and security of Pascal. So the base of users in my immediate vicinity is shrinking year by year, and to my eyes the quality of programs written by graduate students and postdocs is much worse now than it was when Pascal was the first language learnt. After all when you have learnt how to program in Pascal, you can write Pascal in any language, even PERL.
So the question is Where is Pascal taught and used? I don't think that it's in computing science departments: my contact with computer scientists suggests that they regard themselves as far too grand for code-bashing. I suspect that the language is primarily used by what we might call gentleman-programmers, people who need fairly elaborate programs for their work that don't fit easily into the Mathematica, Matlab, systems, but which, for all that, require fairly sophisticated number crunching. Typically such programs are used by the programmers who write them, and so there is little need for fancy user (noddy) friendly interfaces.
So who uses Pascal now? Who teaches Pascal now? Anybody interested in discussing these matters?
John O.