On 3/3/06, Matt Henley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > "My personal objective is not just to put out a simulator, but a fast > and efficient simulator. Furthermore, personally, I do not consider a > program portable if it is written in a language which very few can > understand.
Althought a lot less popular then c, c++ and java, pascal is still reasonably popular, and is easy to learn. Very important software like Skype is written on Object Pascal. Mac OS 7 and below had a lot of Object Pascal code on them, and it's API was written fully in pascal. > A modern language such as any of the .NET languages will > meet the efficiency objective but portability remains an issue. This statement isn't true. .NET in general has performance much inferior to native pascal. Take a look at debian shootout comparison of Free Pascal and c#: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/debian/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=fpascal&lang2=csharp Free Pascal is more then 10 times faster and uses 10 times less memory. Yes, benchmarks are all flawed, but a huge difference like this can point at .NET performance flaws. Also take a look at this article: http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1820607,00.asp Specially the part: <quote>"Everything in Longhorn was supposed to be written in C# and to be managed code. But managed code was going to require machines that weren't going to be available for five years or more. So now Microsoft is rewriting everything in Longhorn, the developer says. Developers claim that the Windows team actually began rethinking Microsoft's .Net Framework and managed code promises last summer, around the time of the infamous "Longhorn Reset." (The Longhorn Reset is shorthand for Microsoft's decision to axe certain Longhorn features, most notably WinFS, in order to be able to commit to a 2006 ship date.) <end quote> > While > I do have the Visual Studio .NET and I am happy with it, I understand > that not everybody has it and it is not cheap. I bet that the price of buying VS will be a much bigger blocker then people needing to write pascal code. Pascal is considered easy to learn, and still used a lot in basic programming courses. > It will however, limit us to > Pascal which is not really a modern language. For those of you who > are in favor of using Lazarus, can you assure the rest of us that > Pascal has been modernized? " When I talk to developers of other languages they all think Pascal is that non-object oriented thing from early 1980s and that it did not change .... people need to know that Object Pascal is the real industry used pascal. One prove that Pascal is evolving still today is the talks on fpc mailling lists about the inclusion of templates (generics). -- Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho _________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
