The future of Pascal as language for games

[SilverWarior]

As much as Pascal purposely introduces some error control, C purposely does not so - following the thought "if you don't want to, no one will force you". So, following the foot joke, it's kind of "compiler forces you to make sure you aren't aiming at your foot before shooting" vs. "you can shoot wherever you like and checking whether you're not aiming at your own foot is up to you".

I can't say for FPC/Lazarus but in latest versions of Delphi you can turn off a lot of theese error checkings. I personally rather see that compiler warns me of potentionally bad code rather than I have to go bughunting becouse of one single poorly writen line. I started programing in C++ and I must say that I had huge problems in making simple code work properly.

As for me, one of the things that still keeps Pascal back is a lack of a good IDE. Recently I had to, as part of my studies, write an app in QtCreator - and honestly, I found it quite entertaining, as the thing had all the syntax completion I could ever long for, drastically reducing the amount of key-smashing needed. As for Lazarus, well, dunno, maybe it's just me, but I absolutely hate hate hate the "shitload of floating windows" type of interface - I would much prefer if there was an option to have a "single window with embedabble/movable/switchable panels" one.

Pascal does have a good IDE and it is Delphi. It alows a lot of syntax autocompletion. The only thing about it is that it forces it's own style of code formating wich is a bit different that the one I'm using.
As for the floating windows from Lazarus. They are implemented like that to mimic Delphi 7 interface. It can become quite useful when programing on computers with multiple monitors. Having floating windows easily alows you to have code window on one screen and Form design window on the other.

And if we are talking about pros and cons I think that the biggest pro for pascal is the ability for quickly rebuild existing project (only units wich has ben changed gets recompiled all others are already compiled from before). Becouse of this you don't have to wait several minutes for some big project to be recompiled just to see how change of a single line affects your application.
I rember the days when I began programing in C++ and had to wait up to a minute to compile some of a bit more advanced Helo World program.
Yes I know that some of today IDE-s for programing in C++ already allow precompiled units but most of them are still slower at linking them together than Delphi for instance.
And finally I probably shouldn't even mention that in some cases Pascal based programs runs better than those made in C++ even when they have same function implemented.