Free pascal java5/30/2023 ![]() I often feel like everyone on Slashdot is a mix of two people Not a few C and Java programs I've seen have even resorted to appending comments to their closing braces to make it clear what paired with what. Brace-delimited languages often use braces for multiple types of controlled clauses, which means it's much easier to lose track of what pairs with which. A lot of begin/end languages have unique keywords to bracket clauses. I've seen stuff where a page and a half separated the primal "IF" from the ending ".".Ģ. At which point the entire if/then/else-pius-nested-conditionals comes to an abrupt end. COBOL goes on and on until someone slaps down a single dot. In the original COBOL, even a pair of curly braces was too obvious. IIRC, pascal begin/end are not optional.ġa, You want to see REAL mayhem, look at one of the COBOL programs I've had to support where generations of "patch-style" programmers have had their way with complex conditional logic. I've been burned more than once by code that didn't contain braces that went haywire because I put a simple debug print right after an "if" and forgot what it did to the existing logic. Any language that doesn't mandate that dependent clauses be wrapped in some sort of delimiter pair is inherently dangerous. Two things that do frost me about brace-style programming languages:ġ. Just skinny little wiggly lines that are relatively easy to skip over, even when syntax-highlighted. I can say that words like "begin" and "end" stand out more (geographically speaking) than the smaller single-character braces, which aren't even fat characters. Words like 'begin' and 'end' look too similar to user-defined variables, whereas the curly braces stand out well.Īctually, for a certain programmer of long experience, I can say that I've never been suckered into thinking a stand-alone word like "begin" or "end" was a variable expression or fragment thereof. Besides, for a Pascal programmer, curly braces are for comments and stand out very well for that purpose.įor a beginner, Pascal may seem more readable. It might mean that you would need to personally take some extra time to learn another programming language. Just because it is different doesn't mean it is worse. Handing Object Pascal code to somebody else already familiar with the language clearly has a huge advantage. The only reason you might notice some developers who have a hard time with Pascal readability is mainly due to the fact that the developer is simply unfamiliar with Pascal syntax due to a lack of development in that language for a prolonged period of time. My direct experience has been in about half of the time or less than a comparable C++ program. I dare say that the software written in Object Pascal can be developed sooner than a comparable application in C++. when you hand those software packages over to another developer to continue development by somebody having to start cold on that software and fix bugs, make extension, or overhaul that code. From a maintainability standpoint when you need to have code written by an experienced software developer familiar with Pascal and its various (current) compilers as opposed to an experienced software developer familiar with C++.
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