[fpc-pascal] Basically on the right track?

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Patrick wrote:

> I fell in love with Ada about 14 months ago. Including the cardboard 
> box, i now have 53lbs of Ada books(A few still to read), I am planning 
> on diving into Pascal in this way too and  I want to mix Ada and Pascal. 

Like a number of other people around here, I've used Modula-2 
extensively in the past. I've also done a bit of selling and supporting 
for Ada, back in the days when there weren't any full implementations 
that ran on PCs.

		Realistically, Ada and Modula-x are dead.

Practically all of the things that made Ada and Modula-2 notable in the 
early 1980s- strong typing, modularity, exception handling etc.- have 
been recognised as "Good Things" and implemented in other languages. 
Also the various adjunct programs that were specified for a full Ada 
implementation have generally been implemented in IDEs for other 
languages (with a particular nod here to the very wide range of programs 
flitting about the Java ecosystem).

Just about everybody agrees that Ada and Modula-2 were praiseworthy in 
avoiding Pascal's "dangling else" problem, and some would argue that 
Pascal implementations could usefully have a switch to allow that 
alternative syntax. But apart from that, I'd strongly caution against 
spending too much time on them except for pure hobby/research interest.

> I am having some trouble compiling gtk pascal examples, the linker can't 
> find -lgtk etc. It looks like it is a naming issue and I can create 
> links to get myself out of trouble however,

As an adjunct to anything written by more experienced users such as Sven 
and Michael: you really need to tell us what version of FPC you're 
running, and what operating system etc. you're running on.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]