18 Feb
2015
18 Feb
'15
6:03 p.m.
On 02/18/2015 07:20 PM, drlegendre . wrote:
I was introduced to Pascal in a high-school AP
computer science course ca.
1986. It was a real eye-opener, and seemed quite powerful after only using
BASIC and the occasional chunks of borrowed 6502 ASM.
Personally, I thought it was an excellent teaching language - at least for
HS students in the late 1980s.
it was CREATED as a teaching language, and then had
to be
extended a bit
to make it usable for professional tasks. I loved it, and
created several
significant pieces of code on it.
I really enjoyed learning to use it - though
as someone who'd had almost ten years' time with BASIC, I found the
emphasis on recursive (sub-)routines to be a bit difficult to grasp.
Something about it just seemed... kludge-y. But functions were a very
welcome addition..
Of course, I've forgotten it all!
I hadn't used Pascal for ages, but recently ported a Gerber
to raster conversion
program that I had written in Borland's Turbo Pascal on
Windown 95 and NT
to run under Linux. Just in time, Free Pascal (FPC) came
out. It was specifically
designed to run old Turbo Pascal and DEC Pascal programs
with minimal
changes.
I must say that what I knew of Pascal came back VERY
quickly, and the only
problems I had were converting a few really oddball
constructs I used
in the old Turbo Pascal program to more modern methods. (I
used some
weird tricks when allocating large chunks of memory for
raster buffers and
bitmaps.)
Jon