Why use Pascal

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"A low level language is one whose programs require attention to the irrelevant."

Introduction

Many times we find Pascal under attack that it is a language, which should be dead, or that is not suitable for to do much.

This document will discuss these claims and add latest informations about pascal as of 2005 and beyond.

What is Pascal ?

Pascal is a very clean programming language, which looks more like English than a computer based one. This is a tremendous advantage in understanding existing code as well as debugging.

While the language started as a way to learn how to write better programming code for computer science studies, over the years the language has matured and gained all capabilites necessary for uptodate software projects (for example the FreePascal compiler or the lazarus IDE).

The particular strength of Pascal is that most of the developing time is spent on the program itself, contrary to C and C++ like language, where the developer needs to focus on managing the memory of variables or the structure of very basic things like passing parameters and returning them back again.

As a result, Pascal developers do not have to learn a new sub-language inside the same language, like C++, STL, MFC.

The Readln and Writeln effect

Most developers, who ever touched Pascal, did not like the language, because they only learned some very basic commands and how to write a more structured code than their mind was thinking at the time.

That is, why languages such as C and Perl for example take the popularity content. While Pascal seems very basic and very minimalistic, when you uncover the true language, you find that it is much easier to create a program in Pascal than in C, Java and other popular languages. Even languages such as Python, that is popular and still remains structured, have many elements of a disoriented language. That issue arrives first of all from the attempt to create the most “perfect�? programming language, that will be easy to use, and have the cleanest way to create things.