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

[bisma at brawijaya.ac.id]

> Well, I still have many contacts in the ICPC world. It can still use 
> them, but I need backup, since I already lobbied hard in the past. So 
> please continue the lobby. Each year, also for the finals, each contest 
> orginaising comittee decides what languages to offer. So, each year is 
> a new opportinity to convince people to offer Pascal.

I'll try but can't promise you the result as I think those people -mostly- 
underestimate pascal. You know, very C/C++ programmers typical. They just 
simply ignore what pascal can do nowadays. :P 

> Yes, Pascal perfectly suitable for contest, and due to lower LOC counts 
> preferable over C++. A problem is the STL though, C++ coders can 
> sometimes take shortcuts here; while juries somehow seem tempted to 
> forbid the use of units in Pascal (an issue I made myself angry about 
> many times in the past).

Agree. I think they should allow common/standard modern pascal units, such 
as sysutils and classes. Without them, we almost need to rewrite all usable 
classes and functions/procedures by ourselves. 

> In the past, Turbo Pascal gave people the biggest advantage, since you 
> develop and debug your program a lot faster than with gcc or Java. FPC 
> has never given these benefits. I've used the FPC IDE in the past, but it 
> always working around the limitations of FPC IDE in xterm. Debugging with 
> gdb wasn't worse than using the FPC IDE. This affects the decisions for 
> teams what language to use.

Ah, the debugger! You have a point here. I forgot to mention it because I 
rarely use it. :D 

> Lazarus, with all its RAD stuff, is terribly in the way. I have done 
> two contests with Delphi as IDE, and while it works very well, for 
> this kind of development an IDE that is focussed just code really helps.
> Further, few contest organizers have been installing Delphi in the past, 
> but many installed the text mode IDE, so this is to focus on.

Just forget the GUI IDE, programming contests don't need a bloated hard to 
configure IDE. No offense for Lazarus. But IMO a GUI IDE is just overkill 
for algorithm/logic programming purposes. A fully working text mode IDE is 
more than enough. 

 -Bee- 

has Bee.ography at:
http://beeography.wordpress.com