[fpc-pascal] Advantages of Pascal

[Jonas Maebe]

On 20 feb 2007, at 19:46, Patrick Leslie Polzer wrote:

>   1) "No Makefiles"
>      ...and yet you ship a Makefile generator with FPC.  Why?

Because you cannot tell the compiler to compiler run time library,  
then itself with the rtl that was just compiled, then recompile the  
run time library with the newly compiled compiler, then itself with  
the newly compiled compiler etc. fpcmake is a tool developed for  
internal use, but everyone is free to use it. You don't strictly need  
it except in complex cases like the above, though.

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

Because you do not need a preprocessor pass, and compiled unit  
interfaces can be reused much more often than e.g. C pre-compiled  
headers because no external defines can influence them (and therefore  
you also need much less checking to see whether or not a unit needs  
to be recompiled).

>   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?

Personal preference.

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

Nowadays you can indeed, yes.

>   5) Why use Pascal instead of Ada?

Personal preference.

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

Yes.


Jonas