Joseph Carter wrote,
>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.
Not as much as you might think. I've only been seriously exposed to three
points along the Borland Pascal evolutionary continuum: Turbo Pascal 3.0,
Delphi 4, and Delphi 6. Though Delphi 4 is clearly a descendent of Turbo
Pascal, so much has been added that it's practically a whole new language.
Lots of new classes were added between Delphi 4 and 6, but the language
itself doesn't seem to have changed in that interval.
Delphi's support for classes feels like it's been ripped right out of
Java. I consider this a plus: Java's class model always struck me as
much cleaner than the complex and unwieldy C++ class model. The
predefined classes that ship with Delphi, however, don't bear much
resemblence to Java's class library...you get lots and lots of support for
Windows API objects and COM and Active X and web services and the like,
but not much in the way of abstract data type classes (the latter is
sometimes annoying--I have occasionally wished Delphi came with something
like a Perl %hash or a Python dictionary (well...TStringList can be
shoehorned into service, but it's just not the same)).
Yes, Pascal supports pointers. But you don't use them as much as you do
in C--Pascal's ability to pass parameters by reference eliminates one of
the major uses of pointers in C. Delphi implements classes with pointers
just like Java does, but (also like Java) it works very hard to prevent
you from needing to know that.
- Neil Parker
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