The future of Pascal as language for games

[SilverWarior]

Hold on folks, before you condemn firemonkey

It wasn't my intention to condemn it. What I wanted is just to share my expiriences of fidling with it for past month or so.
I know that Embarcadero will put a lot of time into improving it in the future. I also realize that curentily optimization of FireMonkey isn't Embarcaderos main goal, but making it compatible with Linux is. Yes at first Embarcadero thought that Deplhi XE2 will already support Linux by using FireMonkey but there were several problems wich prevented that.
So after they manage to make it totaly compatible with Linux and maybe even some other OS-es they will surely focus on optimizing it for each of the supported platforms. And until then I doubt FireMonkey would be suitable for game development. And to be honest I'll be hapy being wrong about this. But only time will thel.

[code_glitch]

Can't agree more there Silverwarrior - if and when embarcadero finally to get delphi out for Linux I for one believe in the notion of them getting many many more coders working with Delphi. And although Firemonkey is not mature yet, neither is anything that throws the ball out that far. As for the future of games, firemonkey may well be it once its optimized. In terms of pascal one thing I cn say for certain is that its not 'dead' as some C folk like to think and neither is it outdated. I will concede the point it needs more characters in some instance to do the same, but thats a feature and its called code readability.

I reckon that as long as embarcadero and the folks over at freepascal stick around, pascal will continue growing.

[Ñuño Martínez]

This is a sacred war that will never end.

One of the origin of this "Pascal isn't a good language" thinking are schools (or it is in Spain). Some schools used Pascal to teach programming basics but they used old and obsolete Turbo Pascal compilers for DOS. Also most programming teachers actually don't know to program in Pascal! Some months ago, in a Spanish forum, somebody asked for help for an exercise. I tell him to wipe out Turbo Pascal and use Lazarus+Free Pascal. When he shows the exercise to the teacher he was in trouble because the teacher didn't believed him and he should install Lazarus and compiled the program to show the teacher he didn't used VisualStudio. That is a big handicap against Pascal.

About the"über-engine", I'll support this too. After the 2nd PGD Challenge I'm learning more OpenGL stuff to upgrade the engine I wrote. I know it will never beat Doom³ but I'll be happy if I can beat Polymost...

Pascal is the most aesthetic and usable language ever, so future of it won't change. Only aesthetes and coders will use it, not mainstream And under "coders" I mean "people who find great pleasure in the art of Computer Programming"(c) Urban Dictionary.

[Carver413]

I would be interested in some sort of uber engine if and only if it could be designed in a way that it didn't interfere with my existing framework. what I mean is Glscene has alot of intersting stuff in it but it is built around the delphi model with tpersistence, interfaces, ect. while my frame work is built around a custom linked list design. so to try to us anything from glscene I would have to figure a way to rip all that out and that is simple not desirable. and I would only be interested in modern opengl design it is the future of cross platform design. if your wanting to show people that pascal is not dead then you need to stop using dead code.