Pascal: Difference between revisions

Historical note: The original Standard Pascal was in many ways a different language from the Object Pascal that most people today are familiar with, being much simpler but also more limited. Dr. Wirth himself did not intend Pascal for systems programming, and his ongoing language evolution were the languages Modula-2 and Oberon. Both languages are related to Pascal in a similar way as C++, C# and Java are related to C. In contrast to the C language family, in the course from Pascal to Oberon the language definition got a lot more compact, but the language itself got more powerful. Oberon-2 supports all concepts of object-oriented programming. The successors of Pascal were developed to address the weaknesses of Pascal in this regard. However, with the widespread adoption of the Object Pascal extensions (e.g.. unit, bitwise operators), many of these weaknesses (most specifically the lack of support for separate compilation) were eliminated. The reputation of Pascal as a toy language has unfairly persisted in many places however.