[fpc-pascal] Pascal is alive!!??

[Krishna]

On 2/20/07, Daniël Mantione <daniel.mantione at freepascal.org> wrote:
>
>
> Op Tue, 20 Feb 2007, schreef Aavani at iust.ac.ir:
>
> > In the ACM-ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contest dropped pascal
> > for this year final competitions and for next year, the students are not
> > allowed to use pascal as their programming language. Did you know this? What
> > is your idea? Also, in TopCoder site, you can not develop your programs with
> > Pascal while as I know, Pascal has all the properties that C++ or JAVA have.
> >
> > Any idea? Is there any technical problem with Pascal to be used in TopCoder's
> > contest?
>

This is sad because Object Pascal is a nice language and fpc is a
great compiler. Most C programs can be translated without too much
trouble. And ofcourse, things like strings are so easy.

> In short, Pascal still rocks in contests. One thing is very important:
> a rock solid text mode IDE under both Windows and Linux. This makes a
> difference in a contest. FPC has never been able to live up to the Turbo
> Pascal level here.

Editors like (g)Vim and (X)Emacs can be easily customized to invoke
the compiler. With fpc, you don't need a makefile as the compiler is
so fast. So, all is required is a keybinding to fire up the compiler.

> I'd say especially the IDE in Linux was only useable
> for people knowledged with FPC to work around the limitations.
>

If you are talking about the debugger, then I guess you have a point
but with Object Pascal, the need for requiring the services of a
debugger is much less say when using C or C++. But then, Emacs comes
with an interface to gdb and its delphi-mode is good too.


Cheers,
Krishna
-- 
We will never run out of things to program as long as there is a
single program around.
 - Alan Perlis