The future of Pascal as language for games

[deathshadow]

I've gotten the "Pascal is dead" asshattery a good deal the past few years... usually they'll point at this ancient article filled with half truths and outdated information as their justification -- they'll call the language 'useless for doing anything' or "inferior to C dialect for getting to the hardware" when that's total 100% grade A farm fresh MANURE!

... and I love rubbing their noses in the sheer number of programs written in Pascal they are probably using and don't even realize it!

Avant? (the IE wrapping browser?) Asus Power4Gear? ThinkSQL? Pixel? GBXEmu? FLStudio? PC Tools Spyware Doctor? Inno Setup? CambridgeCAD? MSI Afterburner? MediaMonkey? PE Explorer? MyCORSA? AVS? BitZapper? IMGBurn? Daring Apprentice? Space Rangers 2? All of CoffeeCup's software?

... and that's the little stuff... How about Partition Magic? MagicISO? CloneCD? IcoFX? Spybot Search & Destroy? ADAWARE?!? WINRAR?!?

How about this one: SKYPE?!?

All those software packages? Written in Delphi... or Lazarus+FPC when there's a cross-platform version. Modern Object Pascal being used to build modern applications... Quite often for multiple platforms at once!

It goes back to something I've been saying for years, the only thing holding Pascal back was a lack of a decent cross platform compiler. Delphi was a good start to keeping Pascal modern by tossing Visual programming on top of it, but FPC+Lazarus takes that cross platform. There's really little you can do in C or C++ that a modern Pascal compiler like Delphi or FPC can't do.

Well, other than write needlessly and pointlessly cryptic code with a half assed object implementation. C++ really excels at that -- hardly surprising since we all know that C and Unix are a hoax.

But as I've said a million or so times the past 30 years, I'd sooner hand assemble 8k of Z80 machine language than try to find a bug in 100 lines of C code.

I swear that C and it's derivatives exists for the sole purpose of perpetuating the idea that programming is difficult -- it isn't... Assembly is simpler than C! It is an ugly, half-assed language that I cannot fathom the desire to use.

But to keep that in perspective, I say the same thing about HTML 5.