is object pascal a good language to use?

It is certainly not a mainstream product. Over the years it has been re-branded multiple times and has never succeeded.

CAN you make games in it? Sure. You can also make games in other obscure languages, if you want.

C++ is a mainstream language, but you will find it more complex than Pascal.

Java and C# are both well-suited for games and have shallower learning curves.

Object Pascal can use pretty much any library that has C bindings, which is the majority of libraries. You don't need to limit yourself just to libraries with specific Object Pascal bindings. However, this does require you spend more effort to use libraries than just using C or C++.

Why did you start working with Object Pascal in the first place?

If you are going to use an uncommon tool, it should have some upside over better supported tools that makes it worth the (inevitable) trouble.

Object Pascal is pretty good for quickly making desktop GUI-based (or console, it has a nice command-line argument parsing system built in, much better than getopt) utility applications, but it's rather lacking in the 3D department. Sure, you can do it, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort.

I loved Object Pascal and everything related to it: Delphi, the FPC and Lazarus. Indeed I was building a multiplatform engine with OGL and DX support a few years ago, but unfortunately I finally realized that the libraries are a huge mess, full of bugs and missing important features, and then I moved to something else. That was very sad to me

I've worked with Delphi professionally for 1 year, and although the syntax is pretty easy to get used to (having used many languages before then) there were still some things bothering me;
I can't recall why, but I think some cases of nested statements resulted in obscure end if end-for statements, but I learned to live with that.
The Borland (Later Embarcadero) IDEs (Of which I've been using the C++ 2010 version beforehand, but none newer) was a mess to use. It often hung, and all the basic things that you tend to get used to in a good IDE (searching, multiple open files, code completion and referencing) performs slowly and at times behaves unexpectedly.
It bothered me that there were no virtual classes in Delphi (As such, the language is Object Based, not Object Oriented)

On the positive side, the debugger integration in Embarcadero is actually very nice. It's a little slower than debugging in VS,
but our projects were also really big (read: too big). There is a lot of customization you can do to sets of breakpoints, enabling series, detailed conditional switches and such.

Embarcadero's form designer does work rather well (It's better than the one in older versions of VS)

Overall, I agree with Bacterius; If you're doing a Desktop GUI game it's fine.
Maybe even a better choice when you're already used to Pascal or Delphi syntax.

To answer your question: I suggest you continue down this path and make a simple GUI game.
Then make a slick, doublefuffered GDI game and eventually, you can take a look at C++. But get used to programming first, there's nothing for a beginner in C++ can't get from ObjP IMO.

I think the general consensus is that Pascal died in the early 2000's. I wouldn't necessarily use it to develop new software anymore.

the reason i chose to learn it is that it is structured, so i can improve my programs structure.

C, C++. C#, Java etc are all structured, infact not that differently.

the reason i chose to learn it is that it is structured, so i can improve my programs structure.

What do you mean by "structured" here compared to the other languages? Are you talking about enforced semantics and syntax? If so, go with Python.

Interesting trivia fact... Anders Hejlsberg created the original Turbo Pascal, then went to work for Borland where he developed Delphi, then moved to Microsoft where he developed J++, C# and now TypeScript.

In an interview about C#, he said it was highly inspired by his work on Delphi ( thus the events and delegates system ), which in turn was inspired by Pascal.

So... if you want to work in modern Pascal, go with C#.


It's amazing the overwhelming influence a small number of people have over the programming landscape! Bjarne Stroustrup, Anders Hejlsberg, Donald Knuth, Edsger W. Dijkstra, Nikluas Worth, Alan Kay, Brian Kernighan, Dennis Richie, ummmm.... there's more, but not a ton. Its amazing that so many programming contributions came from so few people... and that their are so many vikings among that rarefied few.

Its amazing that so many programming contributions came from so few people

Not to burst the balloon or start a row but isn't it amazing that many are middle class, rich, white, straight men?

You will be fine learning any language... well, probably Objective C is the weirdest one. If you learn Java or C# you will be able to deal with almost any other language out there, even the weak typed ones (i.e. Javascript, Actionscript 2 and PHP), and you'll be able to create structured code because Java and C# are pretty strict.

[quote name='Serapth' timestamp='1354636629' post='5007106']
Its amazing that so many programming contributions came from so few people

Not to burst the balloon or start a row but isn't it amazing that many are middle class, rich, white, straight men?
[/quote]

Not in the slightest actually.

For the Scandinavian contributors, they are a socialist largely homogeneous society, vis-à-vis the vast majority of people from that demographic are white and middle class.

In the US it's much the same for a different reason. In the US, this type of work is generally the realm of academia or post-academia, in which the prevailing demographic is both white and middle-upper class. Additionally, post-secondary schooling is provided by the state.

As to the straight comment, that is harder to quantify, one way or the other. Simply put, the information isn't generally available. As a field, although predominately male, sexual orientation has rarely been a huge focus, one way or the other. For one rather extreme example, Danielle Bunten Berry, author of MULE and Seven Cities of Gold had gender realignment surgery. There are plenty of openly gay programmers now, and some in that list may in fact be gay. Many of them are products of the 60-80s though, where coming out of the closet wasn't exactly the thing to do. Long story short, sexual orientation means so very little in the context of programming accomplishments, it simply isn't mentioned or generally relevant.

Apologies, I wasn't trying to derail this or make it an issue. I still think I had a valid point. True, people generally don't care who or what you are in programming.

Pascal is a fine language for coding in. Before lobbying from Sun to use Java, it was the go-to language for pedagogical application (yes, pun intended). The original Macintosh Toolbox bindings were in Pascal, and when Microsoft copied them, the Windows bindings were written as if they were in Pascal.

You won't get a lot of community support, but there are enough fanatics out there you can probably get the help you need.

I would not give up the fight. pascal is a great language, I think I would quit programing if I had to use c++. There are still programers out there making game with it. I am working on some modern opengl stuff that I hope when it is released will help to shed some light on this poor forgotten language.

[quote name='game of thought' timestamp='1354628344' post='5007069']
the reason i chose to learn it is that it is structured, so i can improve my programs structure.

What do you mean by "structured" here compared to the other languages? Are you talking about enforced semantics and syntax? If so, go with Python.
[/quote]
I wouldn't recommend python as a language to start in, rather start in C# or Java, let the compiler help you with finding errors, than having to guess why it isn't working. There is other things python will confuse a beginner with, where pascal is better for.

Pascal was originally designed to teach students how to use structured programming, Object pascal is an extension of this and is still in my mind the best language to teach someone how to program in. The syntax is clear and memory management is easy you create an class instance with it's "Create" method and get ride of it with "Destroy"(this is a virtual destructor) negating all the trouble you have with memory management in C and C++.

My High School computer science department used a custom variant of Pascal named Alice Pascal specifically for instruction.

It sucked, hard. Making me develop an unfair hatred of the Pascal language that took many years to shake. Learning tools that force you into a sandbox and dont let you out are evil and should go the way of the dodo.

I'm not hating on Pascal, just my experiences with a (variant) of it. Unless you went through high school in the Ontario school system quite a while ago, you probably never had to face this particular POS implementation.