[fpc-devel] Re: [fpc-l] type discussion

[L505]

| will respect your wishes and no feelings will be hurt. I believe it will
| help Pascal and breathe new life into it especially as its a dying
| language. I also note there is no such thing as "Pascal" as such even
| Delphi has significant syntax differences with earlier pascal variants
| so I hope that's taken into account.
|

Things like smalltalk, tcl.. those are dying according to sourceforge (40 projects or
so.. whereas Delphi has hundreds or 1000's.

If you want to tell smalltalkers that they are dying because there are only 30 or 50
projects on source forge.. well go to c2.com wiki, there are plenty of them
programmers there, doing work for banks and all sorts of places.

If you want to tell Borland that Delphi is dying due to dotNet, then just download any
popular Delphi application out there like the latest version of totalcommander and you
tell me if it has any significant amount of dotNet code in it. What is said to be
"dying" is most likely a rumor placed out by foolish of fools like Bryan Kerinighan
who even sell books on Pascal themselves.

In fact Pascal/Delphi is still one of the most popular languages - at one time I think
there were more projects in Pascal than visual basic on source forge.. now VB has
slightly more. But it's not as if there are 50 projects in Pascal... like other
languages. No there are hundreds, thousands in Pascal/Delphi.

I guess the problem is that once you start changing a language, what is it anymore?
When does a Mercedes car become no longer a Mercedes car when it has 80 percent your
own parts on it? Wouldn't you kill the Mercedes name and call it something else.. a
new breed of car? i.e. why would you even call your language Pascal or why would it
have anything to do with Pascal in the first place.. why not call it something else,
since it is a new breed.. Wouldn't want to carry the Pascal "bad name" anyway, right?
Maybe because there is already a compiler and you want to re-use code? I don't know. I
think maybe even a better place to start then might be python mailing lists or python
compiler sites if there are any.