[fpc-pascal] dis - Advantages of Pascal

[Neil Graham]

Since the advantages of pascal were being discussed I thought I'd 
mention some of the
 things that make me choose C over pascal for some things.

I don't actually think of these as 'pascal sucks because x'.   It's more 
of 'We need to add x'
It's more compiler than language based.

1. Inline functions.  C supports a lot more here a lot of it comes from 
the #include
       based architecture, to do the same thing to Pascal you'd need to 
store a lot more
       in the compiled unit.  There's work there for someone.

2. SIMD support. I really don't know if this is something that should be 
added to FPC or
     not.  If I knew that SIMD was here to stay I'd say definitely.  The 
tricky bit is it should
     be a way to system independently generate SIMD code for different 
Instruction sets and
     to generate standard non SIMD implementations for targets that lack 
the instructions.
     It would also be interesting to see if there would be optimization 
gains for the compiler
     using some sort of SIMD support at the language level even 
generating non SIMD code.
     Any extension would effectively be giving extra information to the 
compiler about what is
     being done.  That can't hurt can it?

3.  Umm I dunno.  Guess that's why I love Pascal :-)

Of course there's the template-ey thing but that's been done to death.