[Info-vax] Free Pascal for VMS ?

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 5/8/2018 11:09 AM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> As for those wondering why Free Pascal might be more interesting than 
> the existing OpenVMS implementation, have a look at the difference in 
> features: https://freepascal.org/docs-html/ref/ref.html  Among other 
> differences, OpenVMS Pascal hasn't yet added object-oriented programming 
> support.   Wouldn't surprise me to find that some future version of 
> Pascal for OpenVMS either incorporates some of the features from Free 
> Pascal, Delphi and ilk, though that's some years into the future and 
> long after the completion of the OpenVMS x86-64 port.  Or maybe Free 
> Pascal gets ported to OpenVMS x86-64.  Most of the "traditional" OpenVMS 
> programming languages and the associated and underlying OpenVMS APIs and 
> the vendors' development tools haven't moved forward substantially in 
> ~twenty years.  Yes, VSI does aim to change that.

Software development on VMS definitely need to move to OO.

But I don't know if OOifying VMS Pascal is a good thing.

I love Pascal as a language, but it is not a language with a
great future ahead.

Existing VMS Pascal ported to VMS x86-64 would enable
existing Pascal applications to move over.

And I believe that port is needed.

But I do not see a large number of new OO based
applications pick Pascal if VMS Pascal is extended
to support Object Pascal.

It has not happened on other platforms.

FPC is quite popular, but not for new business. For
keeping old stuff running and for hobby usage by all
those developers growing up with TP/BP/Delphi.

And in general I am a bit skeptical about shoehorning
new paradigms into old languages - usually new languages
designed for the paradigm works better.

C++, Java, C#, Kotlin, Scala, Ruby etc. will probably work
better than Object Pascal, Ada 95, OO Cobol etc..

Arne