[Barnz]

I'm two months into my As level programming course at my local sixth form, and we are finally getting around to practical coding rather than the theory. Our teachers have chosen to teach us (a class of four) pascal, object pascal and delphi. After some "Google'ing" it didn't seem as if pascal and such were very popular - or even used at all any more.

I was just wondering if any of you guys/gals had any past experience in pascal, or know of anything substantial that's been programmed in it?

[macosxnerd101]

Pascal is a legacy language. Delphi on the other hand, is used still. A few years back, my dad went to purchase a management system for his business, and a company called BMA had a product written in Delphi.

If you want to look at a language index, Delphi is decreasing in popularity.

[baavgai]

Pascal was the teaching language of choice... in 1985. Turbo Pascal was a hot language in its day.

Delphi was a good solution for Win32 development... before .NET, before even Visual Basic was popular.

The only things currently written in Delphi are legacy ports and projects by people who refuse to let go. I have no doubt there is some commercial software still written in Delphi. Of course, there's still production software written in COBOL.

I did Turbo Pascal in college. It didn't warp me for life, as far as I can tell. It's just a language. You'll learn and forget many computer languages as time goes on.

[Barnz]

Ah I see. Well we all kicked up about having to learn it, because the other options were Java, C, C++ etc. Our teacher seems to think it's a good starting point. Which from what you've been saying is true; it's a good but pointless starting point.

[Maverick89]

We also started with Turbo Pascal in high school, generally it's only used as a teaching language, but it will give you a decent starting point and a good view of the way a programer should think. As with many things, you shouldn't rush your programing language studies, it's a process

[rahulbatra]

I do agree on the posts above that the Pascal family of languages are now decreasing in popularity. However as a teaching language, I still think its a pretty good choice. Wirth's Pascal is still a great way to learn structured programming for a beginner and it trades C's obfuscation for slight verbosity. On the other hand, its syntax, though minimal, is not the epitome of uniformity. The termination characters/calls are different for different constructs.

I do code in non-OO pascal fairly regularly and though the code might not be public, it still is used. A lot of Windows shareware products introduced in the 90s were coded in Delphi but this trend is decreasing in the modern equivalents.