Probably you know that I was a teacher at the Computer Science Department at Universidade do Minho. There I was a C and Perl teacher, as well as other classes that are not relevant for this post. Now, I am working at Instituto Politécnico do Porto, in the Escola Superior de Estudos Industriais e de Gestão. I am not responsible for the class, so I teach what the responsible teacher says. I was quite surprised they still used Pascal.
But this was a stupid question. Now, after getting back to the Pascal world, I noticed Pascal is not dead, and it getting better, and quite far from C when regarding the abstraction layer. I will not discuss efficiency. It I would do that, I would not program Perl anymore.
Pascal is, like C, a compiled language. But it supports growing strings. Strings can be edited as if they were Perl strings. You can add substrings to the string, remove substrings by nothing or other smaller or bigger strings. But you can also use it as an array of characters and access to each character individually. I really miss this feature in Perl.
Pascal is now supporting units as classes. This means it can be programmed as if it were an Object Oriented language. I did not get to that point yet. But it is nice to know Pascal evolved.
Oh, there is a free compiler (free pascal compiler) and there is an IDE (lazarus) that enables GUI application development just like the old Delphi.
Sei que o post tem quase 1 ano, mas anyway… no que diz respeito a sentir falta de pascal, só tenho a dizer que foi bom para entender os princípios de programação, de resto espero nunca mais vir a utilizar tal linguagem.
E já agora, é bom ouvir que se ensina (ou ensinava-se?) Perl.
Pena que nunca tenha tido aulas sobre tal e tenha de aprender sozinho.