[Simh] off-topic basic translator

[Clem Cole]

On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 11:59 AM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
>
> Pascal is also pretty far down the list. In some ways, Pascal will cause
> you bigger problems.

​Traditional (pure) Pascal - a very very true (and sad) observation.
Although,
I still have a soft spot for it and think its the best >>teaching<<
language ever (beat's Python, Java and C/C++ which seem to be what most of
the young folks learn first].


> String handling is often rather restricted and weird in Pascal.

I agree with you.  What Wirth has in the report is pretty simplistic (and I
hated it).  In fact, later Pascal's added pretty sophisticated support for
strings -- but...  in lots of different ways -- I remember at Tektronix on
the early 1980s we counted about 10 different Tek Pascal's (at the same
Hatfield/McOy party we also counted over 30 different HP Basics).  The
different Pascal extensions of course was a huge downfall of Pascal IMO ->
there were too many differences and not enough commonality.   But alas
Pascal/Modula/Sail/Ada (and BLISS) et al lost to C for economic reasons not
really technical ones [says a long time programmer that has written way for
C code than anything else in my life].

That said, the good news is that Free Pascal [ http://www.freepascal.org ]
which Dan wants to use supports most of the modern Pascal extensions, and
in particular the "Delphi" & TP flavor​s

*"The language syntax has excellent compatibility with TP 7.0 as well as
with most versions of Delphi (classes, rtti, exceptions, ansistrings,
widestrings, interfaces). A Mac Pascal mode, largely compatible with Think
Pascal and MetroWerks Pascal, is also available. Furthermore Free Pascal
supports function overloading, operator overloading, global properties and
several other extra features."*




>
> Well, of those choices (including Pascal), I's say that C++ would probably
> be the easiest to target.

​I have to laugh when I read this.  I actually disagree on that observation
and I admit I'm a little surprised to hear it from a European - many (most)
of my European trained colleagues in the technical languages team here hate
C++ and wonder out loud why the Algol family did not win ("You damned
Americans didn't know <insert your favorite comment here>").

It's funny we were just arguing about this at lunch last Friday.  One of
them was calling the designers and implementors of a large programming
system "incompetent" for picking C++ when they could have used Modula-II or
ever Ada in those days.  [Check out a great treatise: "The big problem we
face isn't coordinated cyber-terrorism, it's that software sucks" -
https://medium.com/@felixsalmon/this-is-a-very-lightly-edited-version-of-my-gist-spiel-3fb7eee4c4e5
 ]

Anyway, for someone comfortable with Pascal or Modula for similar family, I
think using Free Pascal should not be much different than using C++ -- you
pretty have all of the same tools at your disposal.  It's about how much
you know how to bring to bear on the problem.



>
>
> I''ll probably go with freepascal as I have tons of libraries I've
>> written already.
>>
>
​That seems like as good a reason as any I have heard.

Clem​
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