[fpc-pascal] Does FPC 2.8.0 can actually still be called Pascal ?

[ik]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 11:21 AM, Marco van de Voort <marcov at stack.nl> wrote:
> In our previous episode, ik said:
>> I was going over the wiki and looked at
>> http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_New_Features_Trunk .
>> It looks like some of the features here, actually breaks Pascal, and
>> create something like Jascal or something, but it's not Pascal in
>> spirit.
>> For example 1000.to_string ?! I have it on Ruby and Java, but it's not
>> Pascal syntax.
>> Same goes for array constructors.
>
> We already have had this discussion for VB (D4/COM extensions), .NET etc.
>
> Yes Delphi will copy everything what is popular in a desperate attempt
> to increase its appeal.
>
>> I actually starting to ask the same questions of Graeme, do we really
>> want to follow Delphi instead of creating a more Pascal like dialect ?
>>
>
> FPC is not clean either. Constructs like case string of remind of basic and
> the proposed tuple support is not exactly hardcore imperative languges (let
> alone Pascal) either.

But the syntax is Pascal-ish, case did not changed, only expanded, and
it actually have a good use.
I don't know the tuple part well, so I can't comment on it.

The for in with FPC is nice, and it's a syntactic sugar, but still it
did not break Pascal syntax.
The ability to have mixin for "primitive" types, or arrays is
something completely different here.

to_string is syntactic sugar to val or IntToStr, but it's not Pascal,
it's Object based syntax, something we do not have in Pascal at the
moment.
And if you do want to have it, then first start to make everything
like it, and then add the mixin, or it's actually make the code less
readable, and much harder to maintain, unlike the other "unclean"
features, such as case for strings.

Ido

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