A blast from the past, does anyone still remember Pascal?
With today’s fast evolving technologies, everybody’s looking up for the latest trend in programming, but do old programming languages like Pascal still have a place to be?
For the people that haven’t even heard of Pascal, it’s an imperative and procedural programming language that first appeared in 1970 , intended to encourage good programming practices. It is a strongly typed, memory safe programming language that is very small and efficient. It had multiple IDE implementations like Turbo Pascal or Borland Pascal. It influenced the development of modern-day popular programming languages like Java, Go and VHDL.
A hello world program written in Pascal would look something like this:
program Hello;
begin
writeln ('Hello, world.');
readln;
end.Pretty clear syntax and easy to understand what each line does, even if you’re not familiar with Pascal.
The question remains, is it still relevant today? Let’s take a look at the following aspects:
Believe it or not, Pascal is still taught in schools.
Yes, you read that right. Although there aren’t many opportunities for a career in Pascal, many people consider it a great language to start with. Based on that idea, and because it is closer to natural language than C++, pascal is still being thought in high schools around the world. In some countries, Pascal can be the programming language of choice in national exams.
As someone who learned Pascal as a first programming language, I can tell you that I have some regrets for not learning C++ as a first language, but the concepts of programming are the same in both, and once you become an experienced programmer, you can learn another language very fast.
Pascal is pretty low-level and can run on extremely limited systems with maximum efficiency.
This is one of the key features of the Pascal language and its IDEs. It can run on almost anything. In a modern world where everybody has a computer or a phone stronger than the system used to fly a rocket to the moon, this may not seem to mean much, but that makes it the perfect language to be used on old and obsolete computers still used in embedded systems and in all kinds of factories and industrial workplaces.
One practical example I can give you comes from a factory where I used to work where they had an ancient computer with Pascal booted under DOS that was monitoring a generator and was plotting a voltage level graph on-screen, and at the same time, was giving speed adjustment commands to the generator. So, even if it was used in a less IT-centric environment it was still part of a production workflow. Maybe some people will say that there are better solutions for monitoring and real-time adjustments on industrial equipment, and that would be right, but given the fast response time and extremely low implementation costs it made a perfect solution.
Another popular program that comes to mind when thinking about Pascal was a tool that helped you make a service memory stick for the Playstation Portable gaming console made by Sony. That enabled you to restore a bricked(broken) console to functionality. Although it was sometimes used for piracy purposes, I still think it’s worth a mention.
The examples above are things I’ve encountered personally, but I know there are still businesses and military services that still use Pascal because of reliability factors.
Can you still use Pascal on modern-day systems?
The answer is of course you can! There is a modern IDE called Free Pascal that is being constantly updated, that brings Pascal to modern computers and operating systems, but also to a lot of very limited or ancient systems like AVR microcontrollers and old Nintendo consoles like the DS.
You can check it out here:
Conclusion
Pascal is pretty amazing, still having some relevance after over 50 years from it’s initial release. It’s lightweight resource consumption and speed makes it incredibly fast and easy to run, even on very old and limited systems. It’s a great way to get introduced to programing, although you might also want to consider C/C++.
