On Sun, Jan 11, 2004 at 09:25:23AM -0800, john fleming wrote: > I read a n article about relative performance between languages, though > pascal was not one of the nine > the article said that it should be included in future tests. So I did a > little more research on pascal and found out it does pointers and is > faster to program with than C , It seemed that that might be a good > second languuge after python ,but it doesn't seem to be used that much.
Pascal has an annoyance or two.. There are four basic variants: ISO Pascal (useless), Borland Pascal (which has been somewhat evolutionary over the years, but whose last version can be considered the authoritative implementation at this point), GNU Pascal (which has a ton of similar but not directly compatible extensions to ISO, and Borland Object Pascal. Object Pascal is probably the target to aim for, and a compiler that supports Object Pascal is (or at least was) necessarily a superset of Borland Pascal. Neil can comment about how much Delphi has evolved since the 16 and early 32 bit days I hope. FPC (I guess they've dropped the C now and it's just FreePascal?) was originally written in Borland Pascal 7, at least until it was complete enough to compile itself. The problem is that of bootstrapping. Anyway, when I last looked at FPC, it had a couple of minor extensions over Borland syntax, and I'm not sure this is a good idea. They have added support for Object Pascal and it is even possible to recompile Delphi components for it on Windows. My complaint with it does not produce standard .o files for the UNIX systems to which it is ported. It has maintained a Pascal-convention stack, and is basically interfacable to C code in a complex manner. No attempt has been made to make, eg, a clone of the Win32 Delphi controls which happens to be cross-platform by virtue of wx or gtk+ or whatever. Why this mattered in comparison to C is that because FPC did not use native object format and calling convention, there was more work to do in order to port something. Much may have changed since I last played with it, though. By the time I got it to work the way I wanted, I knew enough C to port all of my old code directly. I admit that I kinda miss the Pascal streams, but they were basically weird special-case stuff. Also, at the time there was only ia32 support. Let's face it, x86 is dead. The world is moving to 64 bit chips and if FPC has not been ported to at least 32 bit PPC and x86-64 by now, it isn't likely to be useful for very long. Again, some or all of these concerns may have been resolved. _______________________________________________ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
