I'm posting this in the lounge instead of programming because this is likely to be very subjective.

I don't remember exactly how, but a couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon something written in pascal, and before I knew it I was downloading freepascal and playing around with it. I guess I'm coming into it to late; I never played with pascal when it was popular. I went from qbasic straight to C, and then java, and various other 'curly brace' languages.

Does anyone use freepascal or delphi? Breaking away from curly-brace land, and finding myself in begin/end reminds me a lot of my qbasic days (if/end if, etc), but it's new, like when I was learning programming back then, but I also get advanced things I didn't use back then, like pointers, objects, etc. It's a nice combo of new and nostalgia.

Playing around with this was a fun diversion, but I'm starting to think that attempting a larger project in it would be worthwhile.

• has anyone written a game in pascal and had a great time?
• has anyone written a game in pascal and had a nightmare getting it finished?
• would the ratio of good times/bad times be any different in C++ than in pascal?

Pascal is absolutely dead and Delphi is almost certainly dead, although the website for Delphi is almost disturbingly alive. http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi So presumably somebody is still using it, though I suspect it's probably not ideal for games.

I know a few people working on stuff in Delphi. Mainly legacy stuff and projects relating to that code base, but they seem happy with how things are going for them.

I do 90% of my coding in python, with bits of C thrown in from time to time. Also picking away at a few android apps here and there, but nothing exceptionally interesting to be honest.

The pascal programmers I know have moved on to Rad Studio (embarcadero). Can't recommend this experience unless there is no alternative. If you have issues, there will be little in the way of online help or community.

I haven't used Pascal in years, but do remember it as it was the my first stepping stone into proper programming languages.

At college back in 1994 we were taught Borland Pascal before moving on to Borland C++, then at University in 1997 we went back to Pascal and in our first year learned Delphi, before again progressing on to Borland C++ Builder.

When I used Pascal I felt it to be a half-way house between using Basic (prior to college I'd had ZX Spectrum and a Commodore Amiga and had taught myself how to write programs in ZX Spectrum Basic and AMOS

At College I did develop a small game in C++ which was just a >- spacecraft that used to fire minus signs at aliens, it worked entirely in text and was surprisingly addictive (I think it was possibly because we were banned from using the computers at college for gaming, but with this everyone could play a computer game and anyone who popped in to wonder what we were doing would just think it was programming!)

At Uni we were also given the challenge of creating a game in Delphi. The game was a very basic "3d type" game that just relied on a square image box that loaded images depending on what button the end user pressed, so it didn't actually use any 3d programming, but it kind of give the impression it was in 3D.

I learned Pascal on IBM mainframes with a custom weird OS back in 1988, haven't touched it since those days.

It was generally always seen as a good language for teaching with; a nice mixture of the simplicity of BASIC but the structure of a C-like language (the only viable C-like language back then was C itself), while avoiding the bad habits of the former and the added complexity of the latter. IIRC the understanding was that one would always move on to a "real" language once one had exhausted the potential of Pascal, which was - as I said - for teaching/learning, not for actual using. I'm summarizing the opinions of others here by the way, so feel free to disagree but please don't pull me up personally on it (for the record, and with hindsight, I can think of quite a few use cases where it would be a good fit even today).

Back then Delphi wasn't relevant because it didn't exist, and OOP itself was more of a research/plaything/concept than something you'd seriously consider using in production code: there were OOP languages for sure, but they didn't seem to have any traction outside of academia.

Though I have never used Delphi directly, I used its VCL GUI underpinnings via Borland C++ back before Embarcadero bloated up the toolchain. From what I saw of the language, it seemed that the really strong point was the platform that it ran on and the awesome GUI tools (Back when Visual C++ 6 was... not very visual lol).

The great GUI builder is recreated to a large extent in http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org

I believe the lack of popularity is the fact that it is only really pushed via a single (quite unknown) company whereas Java and C# get much more publicity.

Two of my all time favourite (though admittedly very obscure) games were written in it. Graal 1.39 (graal.in) and Diablo RL (http://diablo.chaosforge.org/).

Edit: Apparently the Lazarus project is planning on re-creating the C++ bindings to its Delphi written GUI library (As Borland did). That would be awesome.

If pascal's structure is good for teaching and beginners, would it make a good game scripting language? Or at least its syntax used as the basis for a simple language? I have a long-running project I've been working on in my free time, which is basically a Descent clone. I have a lot of good low-level C code for opengl. I can fly the camera through a portal/sector maze, fly around procedurally generated planet surface. I have enough game 'fragments' written to 'prove' the C code that draws and manages graphics objects.

I can't imagine writing the whole game in C itself. The plan is to eventually write the high level 'main game loop' that drives all the low level components in a simple interpreted language. Originally I considered writing an interpreter for a qbasic-like language, but now I'm thinking pascal-like might be a better fit. It seem friendlier than a c-like language, but less verbose than basic.

It was a long time ago I wrote anything in Pascal, but I have only good memories with the language.

It was more or less the official high level language for the original Mac, and we wrote most of Mission Starlight in Pascal, apart for some low-level graphic stuff that were in 68k assembly language. The IDE had complete and automatic code formatting/indentation and keyword highlighting, which mean you just write the code and didn't even think about formatting. I miss that feature even today.

Unfortunatly yes. Pascal was a great language and I wish it could make a comeback but, its very unlikely. I think skype was using Pascal for a while but now they don't even use it anymore.
I'd still say that the Delphi IDE was the best software development tool that I have ever used but, now the cost is just stupid.