Re: What do you guys think of Pascal, in terms of accessibility and modern
To give you some idea just how archaic archaic is, it stopped being popular before VB6 stopped being popular, if I have the timelines right. It was a big deal once upon a time, but unlike 3 or 4 other things it died off.
You're correct in saying that it died off before VB classic did, but let me lay out the timeline a bit, so you get how old Pascal and BASIC are. I'll explain the creation and increase in popularity throughout the 70's, then I'll skip ahead to the 90's when the languages reached their peak among PC programmers.
1964: John G. Kemény and Thomas E. Kurtz create the original BASIC (Beginners, all-purpose, symbolic instruction code) at Dartmouth College, after being frustrated by Fortran.
1970: Niklaus Wirth creates Pascal, named after the famous Blaise Pascal, after becoming frustrated with Algol60 and failing to improve it with the AlgolW project.
1973: "101 BASIC Computer Games" is published by David Ahl, and BASIC's popularity on minicomputers such as the DEC PDP series and HP 2100 series, increases.
1975: Microsoft's first product was, in fact, a version of BASIC for the MITS Altair 8800, one of the first personal computers.
1976: Microsoft ports BASIC to the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor.
1977: UCSD Pascal, one of the early versions of Pascal to be ported to various personal computers, is created at the University of California, San Diego.
1978: Steve Wozniak creates Integer BASIC for the Apple I, which is added to the ROM chip for the Apple II.
1979: Apple Computer publishes Apple Pascal, based on UCSD Pascal, for the Apple II.
1989-1990: Turbo Pascal 5.5 and 6.0 were released. These were the first to bring object-oriented features to IBM PC users, since Object Pascal was created by Apple and had been used by Macintosh programmers since 1985.
1991-1992: Microsoft introduces Visual Basic 1.0 for Windows 3.1 and DOS.
1993: Visual BASIC 3.0 is released. This was the first extremely popular version of VB, and was the first to support reading and writing of Access databases. Borland releases Turbo Pascal 7.0, the first version to support creation of Windows executables and DLL's and introduce syntax highlighting.
1995: Microsoft introduces Visual BASIC 4.0, the first version that could create 32-bit as well as 16-bit Windows programs. Borland introduces Delphi 1.0 for Windows 3.1, based on Turbo Pascal for Windows, and is one of the first examples of Rapid Application Development.
1996-1997: Borland releases Delphi 2 and 3. Delphi 2 introduced support for 32-bit Windows, and Delphi 3 introduced support for the COM architecture.
Microsoft introduces Visual BASIC 5.0, the first version to exclusively support 32-bit Windows and support for user-created controls.1998: Visual BASIC 6, the most popular edition of VB classic, is released. A major improvement was introduced in VB6, that is, to allow creation of web-based applications. Borland, then called Inprise, releases Delphi 4.0, which includes improvements such as method overloading, dynamic arrays, Windows 98 support, Java interoperability, and high performance database drivers. It was the last version shipped with Delphi 1 for 16 bit programming.
Whereas Visual BASIC was replaced with VB.net, Delphi still exists. Inprise, which went back to the Borland name, now known as Embarcadero, still sells Delphi. Although Borland/Embarcadero did produce versions of Delphi for the .net Framework, support for delphi.net was dropped in 2009. The latest version of Delphi is Embarcadero Delphi 10.3, codenamed Rio.
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
