[fpc-pascal] dis - Advantages of Pascal

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Fri, 23 Feb 2007, schreef 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.

We've got a inline procdir? Or are you referring to macros?
 
> 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?

There exists a Vector Pascal compiler. They basically extend the language 
with features to do vector operations, allowing them to do ground-breaking 
performance. The Vector Pascal extenstions are under our consideration, 
however, we need the infrastructure in the compiler first. Until then, 
take a look at Vector Pascal itself.
 
Daniël Mantione