Pascal, for structured programs
From Blaise Pascal to Niklaus Wirth
Pascal was designed in 1970 by Nicklaus Wirth to impose programmers a structured
programming style. Pascal has successors, Modula and Oberon, which add module
and access to system resources.
But because these features has been added
to Pascal itself by implementation of Borland.
Pascal is often used for teaching. This is a classical language (more
is not possible) that imposes a rigourous programming.
The Delphi
implementation on Windows and Kylix on Linux are specialized client-server programming tool and their IDEs
allow to build easily applications.
Pascal is less and less used, particularly because Java or C# allow to program more easily same tasks, and that Basic has become an evolved language with objects.
The main features of this language:
- strictly structured programming.
- imports allows including functions from external modules, with no headers required as in C.
- procedures and functions, the formers returning values.
- objects added further.
Sample code displaying the characters of a string:
cont str = 'demo';
var i:int; len:int;
begin
len:= length(str);
for i:=0 to len do
begin
write(str[i]);
end;
end;
Development tools
- Turbo
Delphi
Visual development environment by Borland. Free to build commercial products. - Free Pascal
An object oriented port of Pascal, near the Turbo Pascal 7 from Borland. Can produce binary code or byte code for the Java virtual machine (JVM).
Free and open source. - GNU Pascal
Another open source compiler. - Pascal Central
Resources.
