I loved writing Pascal and Modula-2 at the time, and using both for a while sure made me a better programmer. Pascal was an excellent educational tool, but for a decade had enormous business impact, too.
I was introduced to ucsd pascal on apple 2 but switched to Ada by the time turbo pascal came out.
This intro is nice but I feel Ada is the way to go if one is into wirthian languages.
armcat
This takes me back, my first adventure in programming was as a 12 year old creating a Pong clone using Turbo Pascal on DOS. It came in handy later as a 20 year old when I was doing freelance as a Delphi dev. Amazing to see Pascal on HN.
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WillAdams
I bought Delphi ages ago, but never got very far with it, which I regret.
I'd love to be able to take it up again, and this document looks very promising for that, esp. paired with:
If someone has an example graphical project which compiles to an HTML page w/ JavaScript using the above, I'd love to see it and a detailed set of build instructions and notes on installing the needed toolchain and deployment. (as a note, I'm currently working in flet.dev using Python which allowed me to get a small prototype up-and-running, but I'm still looking into self-hosting and doing something more complex)
fatty_patty89
There's also a new book called Free Pascal From Square One released in 2025 that teaches programming and pascal
baranul
It's amazing how underestimated the Object Pascal language is. Certain people or rivals want to write it off or declare it's "dead", yet the language (including various dialects) are still going strong.
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jqpabc123
I was introduced a very long time ago --- aka Delphi 2. I really like the language but there are mainly 2 problems that stand in the way of using it.
1) The code isn't as "optimized" as it could be.
2) The talent pool is limited --- chicken or egg issue.
It has been this way for a very long time so I don't see it changing.
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agumonkey
Perfect to implement your own haskell I guess :p
burner420042
Huwstube and Bg-Lazarus-en-CreatingaWeb-s8e are great youtube channels.
ei8ths
this is really neat to see and that it has support for any modern system. I don't know pascal and could be a fun way to learn it.
shevy-java
I think I last used Pascal, TurboPascal if I remember correctly,
in school - perhaps at age 17 or something like that. I recall
that we used to define some things from geometry, e. g. a triangle,
calculating sides, angles, surface area and so forth, and then
of some more objects from geometry.
I have not used Pascal since then but it was not the most terrible
programming language of all times either. These days I would not
know why I'd want to use it, compared to IMO better languages. Nonetheless
I found it ok for teaching in school back then.
desireco42
AI will do all our work now, but man at least I lived and wrote Pascal growing up.
theamk
> 5.1. Remember to free the class instances
> The class instances have to be manually freed, otherwise you get memory leaks.
I loved writing Pascal and Modula-2 at the time, and using both for a while sure made me a better programmer. Pascal was an excellent educational tool, but for a decade had enormous business impact, too.
Most criticized things regarding Pascal e.g. https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pas... were already fixed by extension or coukd be fixed easily.
Its slight verbosity - somewhere between C and COBOL - arguably was a pro rather than a con.
Today, Ada and Julia seem to be the langages alive that resemble Pascal the most.
Photoshop 1.0 was written mostly in Object Pascal with some 68000 assembly language; source code is available:
https://computerhistory.org/blog/adobe-photoshop-source-code...
I was introduced to ucsd pascal on apple 2 but switched to Ada by the time turbo pascal came out. This intro is nice but I feel Ada is the way to go if one is into wirthian languages.
This takes me back, my first adventure in programming was as a 12 year old creating a Pong clone using Turbo Pascal on DOS. It came in handy later as a 20 year old when I was doing freelance as a Delphi dev. Amazing to see Pascal on HN.
I bought Delphi ages ago, but never got very far with it, which I regret.
I'd love to be able to take it up again, and this document looks very promising for that, esp. paired with:
https://wiki.freepascal.org/pas2js
which I now see is supported in Lazarus.
If someone has an example graphical project which compiles to an HTML page w/ JavaScript using the above, I'd love to see it and a detailed set of build instructions and notes on installing the needed toolchain and deployment. (as a note, I'm currently working in flet.dev using Python which allowed me to get a small prototype up-and-running, but I'm still looking into self-hosting and doing something more complex)
There's also a new book called Free Pascal From Square One released in 2025 that teaches programming and pascal
It's amazing how underestimated the Object Pascal language is. Certain people or rivals want to write it off or declare it's "dead", yet the language (including various dialects) are still going strong.
I was introduced a very long time ago --- aka Delphi 2. I really like the language but there are mainly 2 problems that stand in the way of using it.
1) The code isn't as "optimized" as it could be.
2) The talent pool is limited --- chicken or egg issue.
It has been this way for a very long time so I don't see it changing.
Perfect to implement your own haskell I guess :p
Huwstube and Bg-Lazarus-en-CreatingaWeb-s8e are great youtube channels.
this is really neat to see and that it has support for any modern system. I don't know pascal and could be a fun way to learn it.
I think I last used Pascal, TurboPascal if I remember correctly, in school - perhaps at age 17 or something like that. I recall that we used to define some things from geometry, e. g. a triangle, calculating sides, angles, surface area and so forth, and then of some more objects from geometry.
I have not used Pascal since then but it was not the most terrible programming language of all times either. These days I would not know why I'd want to use it, compared to IMO better languages. Nonetheless I found it ok for teaching in school back then.
AI will do all our work now, but man at least I lived and wrote Pascal growing up.
> 5.1. Remember to free the class instances
> The class instances have to be manually freed, otherwise you get memory leaks.
manual memory management in 2026?