On Thu, 31 Mar 2005, Prof A Olowofoyeku (The African Chief) wrote:
On 31 Mar 2005 at 7:40, John Ollason wrote:
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?
[...] Go here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2435 and look at the number of downloads of gpc (for Win32), and compare with with the downloads of gcc on the same page. Furthermore, go to the Delphi newsgroups and see what is happening there.
Pascal is far from a dying language, even if no-one is teaching it in school (I didn't learn it in school, but am rather self taught - and so are the vast majority of Delphi/BP programmers that I know). If Pascal was a dying language, I doubt that Borland would expend enormous resources in continuing to develop Delphi.
Perhaps I am over-pessimistic, and would be pleased to be proved wrong. I get ground down by the triumphalism of the C tradition, and its developments. I have the feeling that the rise of the object-oriented extensions to the C tradition of programming is to a great extent a work-around for the lack of real block-structuring in C and the languages that derive from it, and is largely unnecessary for Pascal, but this could just be a habitual structured-programmer's conservatism.
John O.