is object pascal a good language to use?

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18 comments, last by Serapth 11 years, 4 months ago
i have been making my way through a tutorial very slowly(purposefully). Regardless i will continue on with it. However, the library scene seems quite sparse (GLscene and zengl being the only libraries i have found on the internet to.be useful). Should i move back to c/c++ after maybe 3 months study? please suggest what i should do.
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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.

“If I understand the standard right it is legal and safe to do this but the resulting value could be anything.”

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.

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