[fpc-pascal] Advantages of Pascal

[Florian Klaempfl]

Patrick Leslie Polzer schrieb:
> Dear FreePascal adepts,
> 
>   when I was younger (about seven years ago), I wrote several programs
> in Borland's Turbo Pascal version 7 (IIRC).
> 
>   I then learned C and haven't looked much at Pascal ever since.
> However, I'm still fond of Pascal's clear syntax, so I would like
> to know more about its advantages.
> 
>   I would be very grateful if you could answer the following questions,
> loosely based on the "Advantages" section of the FreePascal homepage.
> 
> 
>   1) "No Makefiles"
>      ...and yet you ship a Makefile generator with FPC.  Why?

You're project don't need them. But the fpc libraries are something very 
complex being build for different target from the same source, 
containing also informations how to install things, build releases etc.

But we're just getting rid of make :)

> 
>   2) "Pascal compilers are Fast with a big F [...]"
>      Why is that?

Module support, properly designed language.

> 
>   3) "Great integration with assembler"
>      Is being able to use Assembler easily inline really that much
>      better as opposed to having the code in separate object files?

Yes, you don't need an external assembler. You can access parameters 
literally etc.

> 
>   4) "Smartlinking"
>      Ah, I think you can have that one in C with some obscure linker
>      flags, too.

Not as easy as in pascal.

> 
>   5) Why use Pascal instead of Ada?

Why Ada and not Pascal?


> 
>   6) Can I have run-time range checking of arrays/strings and *still*
>      use functions that accept arrays of any length?

Yes.

> 
>   Thank you so much in advance for helping me.
> 
>     Leslie
> 
>