C/C++ vs Pascal

[phibermon]

I totally agree with chronozphere, Learning lots of languages is the way to go, it does indeed, without a doubt make you a better programmer.

But OOP is my favourite language and it will always be.

From a pure project perspective, if I have a task to complete that requires a native language I can always complete the job faster in OOP. And that's not because it's my strongest language, if anything my strongest language is C++ but when dealing with a large complex system, the OOP style leads to far less bugs which on any sizable project will always be the dominating factor, no matter how good you are.

Of course, if your project is on Windows and doesn't require blistering performance? .NET offers faster development times than both (although not strictly because of garbage collection! believe me, on a large, memory hungry project? it *will* become more trouble than it's worth)

But Native Code? can't beat OOP for time to market, Borland knew this, Embarcadero knows this.

And picking up development on existing project? (other than .NET) OOP wins again, I'd of moved on to the next class in OOP while I'd still be studying the previous one in C++

if it was a subject I knew as well as a C++ competitor? I'd always win in an implementation race.

[Daikrys]

this is incorrect, since delphi 2009 there is a directive to allow pointer maths......

{$POINTERMATH ON}

since i use it all the time....

guys the thread is so old no wonder why since delphi 2009 there are some more stuff

the reason why in theory there are more C++ developer is that it was free from beginning and there was alot of free compilers out there
today its just so that cause of this early matter that most studios use C++ (cause its not only game developer but also engine developer)
newer engines btw. support C++ style language but dont use C++ as common solution (see lua, unreal script etc.)

fun fact is as far as i now there few developers who develope there tool chain in Object Pascal or C#

[Colin]

that may be true, but pascal is by no way a bad choice, there is no performance loss by using delphi vs c++, they both are relatively the same nowadays, but the benifit of delphi is the readability, you could say pascal resembles more assembly than c++ could ever.... readable words are always much easier for the human brain than symbols, i know many people will now argue the toss that c++ is more readable and so on, but that is just because it is their favorite language (which of course is fine - but it still is besides the point)

and yes i know this thread is old, but people still come across this thread and read it so its best for potential new delphi developers not to get the wrong idea.

[Daikrys]

readable words are always much easier for the human brain than symbols, i know many people will now argue the toss that c++ is more readable and so on, but that is just because it is their favorite language (which of course is fine - but it still is besides the point)

thats on of the reasons why I use pascal :>
its fun to code in pascal and easy to understand for me, i still learned a bit of C++ but i really dont like it, i dont like to use pointers and often get confused by these symbolic language when it comes to complex problems (or sometimes even easy ones x) )

[LP]

Why are you still debating Pascal vs C/C++? Why not English vs French?

For beginners, the language itself does not matter as long as it can be represented in a fairy readable way and it mostly depends on who is teaching this subject.

In professional sphere, as long as you took enough software engineering courses, the language also does not matter because it's just a low-level way of representing your final application's architecture. You'll be spending time doing other things anyway, such as designing UML diagrams, etc. Converting the properly-written diagrams to code is mostly a trivial task and there are IDEs that do this for you.

In any case, a proficient developer will use almost any programming language as a powerful tool. Well, the only exception is probably Lotus Notes Script.

The only thing that makes the difference is the compiler itself and the development IDE. The first can make your application execute faster (though in many cases these days raw execution speed is no longer an issue) and the second saves time when writing and/or modifying code.

I think latest versions of Visual Studio and Delphi XE 2 work very well in terms of compiler, and they have excellent IDEs. Even for PHP, there are some excellent IDEs, like Nusphere's PhpEd.

For beginners I think C#, Delphi's Pascal and PHP are all excellent candidates to start with.

[chronozphere]

@LifePower: I completely agree with what you are saying. Learning a new language is mostly about the syntax, while most of the semantics are shared between different languages, making it easier to learn a whole bunch of them.

But OOP is my favourite language and it will always be.

OOP is not a language. It's a paradigm. The paradigm is "used" in different language. JAVA is entirely based on OOP, but Pascal/C++ are so called multi-paradigm languages, supporting both the "procedural programming paradigm" and the "object oriented programming paradigm".

[code_glitch]

Although I'm not an advocate of reviving very ancient threads (a bit like this one now I think of it... ) I simply can't resist the temptation :

FPC AND PASCAL OVER C++ ANYDAY!!!!
PASCAL FTW!

In seriousness, code readability is a big thing for me - counting curly brackets, and cryptic loops and typecasts simply fails to appeal to me for some reason

[User137]

I never really got into C++ classes and templates... they turn my head in. Simple thing as pointer usage itself is much more confusing.

[LP]

Just wanted to add something constructive to the discussion. Strictly speaking, deciding to use certain language in some cases does mean the explicit use of certain IDEs. For instance, if you want C#, most likely you will work in Visual Studio; on the other hand, if you want to work with Pascal, most likely you'll end up using Delphi or FPC/Lazarus.

In my own case, when I started learning to program, the only choices were Basic and Pascal. Later on, when I got my hands on C/C++ compiler/IDE, I didn't like the idea of separating class's headers in separate files, in most cases it was more nuisance than useful; many source code files can become difficult to organize. Later on, Delphi appeared. For quite some time, Visual C++ didn't allow WYSIWYG interface design and its own visual library was difficult to use, so I stayed with Delphi.

Roughly ten years ago C# appeared and they finally got rid of the separate header files and added class properties, something that was really missing in C/C++ for quite some time and it's an important design feature in software engineering (there are ways to overcome this in C++ for some versions of Visual Studio by using templates and so on, but it's not standard among different compilers). However, it has its own nuisances as you always have to distribute .NET and/or .NET profile packages because rarely people will have the latest .NET installed on their machine.

Right now, I'm still sticking with Delphi because of the native compiler. In my case, for scientific applications I need real-time speed; for game development it is also important. Suffice to say, we would not be able to create Aztlan Dreams using C# or Java: the AI makes 3-4 turn predictions with 8-level branching (this doesn't sound too much, but think of the fact that for each combination you need to model the entire 64x64 map and its scripts) using multi-threading on multi-core CPUs, which will be difficult to solve in real-time on a virtual machine.

In our institute, the administration department always thought that Java (and other VM-based languages) will take over the world. Apparently, this did not happen. Yes, Java right now is on the majority of the cell phones (Blackberry, Android, etc.), but that is because of the engineering design: it is much easier to make a short portion of OS, implement VM and then run all existing code in Java, rather than to create native compiler for every possible hardware combination. In this case, Java is used mostly for historical reasons; they could pretty much use C#, JavaScript or even Lua for that matter.

[code_glitch]

AirPas: Wouldn't that be NASM? I believe nothing is faster than ASM on x86... Although I'm more of a devcpp/gcc fan myself...