Last week www.beginend.net was launched with the goal of aggregating Pascal and Delphi blogs in a mobile-friendly, secure website with a minimalist UI.
The website is Pascal-Powered: the server is Delphi-compiled DWScript Sample Web server, the server-side page generation and APIs are handled by DWS and an SQLite database, and the client-side is a SmartPascal application compiled on-the-fly to JavaScript by the server.
The FreePascal version of DWScript has been stalled for a little while on the incomplete UnicodeString (utf-16) support among other things.
It’s hard to blame the FreePascal team for that, given that Linux is primarily utf-8, and that utf-8 has quite a few advantages over utf-16.
As a followup to the TIOBE & Pascal micro saga, thanks to David Champion, DWScript programming is now a (very) small part of the TIOBE TPCI stats, and Oxygene became its own language at position #163.
Here is an excerpt from the TIOBE update for July 2013
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Worst thing in popularity is not being considered, or found.
Looks like TIOBE is not alone in differentiating Delphi and Pascal, other popularity indexes share the same issue:
More indexes I looked at didn’t show the “runners up”, only the top 5 or top 10, but they may as well have differentiated.
For lang-index, merging Pascal (rank 11) and Delphi (24), would be enough to reach rank 10, ahead of Ruby, just shy of Perl.
For some unfathomable reason, the TIOBE index distinguishes between “Pascal” and “Object Pascal”, and the “Pascal” category is seeing growth:
So it can’t be the old classic procedural Pascal, can it? That leaves only Object Pascal dialects (FreePascal the largest, but also Oxygene and SmartPascal/DWScript). Pascal programming isn’t dead or dying.
Here is the news summary for September 2012, top new items are initial FreePascal support and introduction of lambdas syntax.
Serg recent wrote an introduction to unit testing under Lazarus, showing how everything is there, but just that little bit “off” because of different unit names between FPCUnit and DUnit.
Not being a fan of ifdef, the prospect of having unit tests “uses” sections littered with ifdef did not attract me, so I made a little adapter unit to keep the “uses” sections clean.
There are several things planned and underway for the next DWScript version, this post will serve as a roadmap of sorts.