blaise: A modern, self-hosting Object Pascal compiler built for the 2020s. Zero legacy, full ARC, and unified UTF-8
11 points by tomekw
11 points by tomekw
While I'm not entirely happy with the decision to totally abandon shortstrings, a gross simplification of the "there's more than one way to do it" which aflicts modern Pascal is well overdue.
Only "modern" Pascal? IIRC that has been a bane of the language for a while. Patching rather basic missing elements in the standard, depending on your use case. Adding in more complicated and thus opinionated features like concurrency or object-orientation…
Language creator having moved on to other languages in the meantime. Greedy companies.
Looking at the balkanization of Pascal and Basic, it's a surprise that C avoided that.
I didn't want to say "Pascal with objects", "Pascal with partial ARC", "Pascal with generics" or to similarly make a value judgement based on the point at which I no longer felt that useful stuff was being added.
The real problem is a refusal on the part of multiple generations of implementors to say "We've just added /this/ to the core language, so /that/ can be removed and replaced by something in the standard libraries. Plus a complete failure to understand the importance of proper library documentation, which should be easier for Pascal than for languages which put less emphasis on enumerated types etc.
This looks extremely nice! Nicely done. Good to see that self-hosted and LLVM are next on the roadmap too.