The (computer) language question

John Meilak wrote (March 13) that Pascal is an outdated and old fashioned language but went on to argue that notwithstanding these factors it helps students to easily understand other languages in a relatively short time.

I agree with the latter, however to argue that Pascal should be adopted instead of more modern OO languages is like stating it would be fine to use a stone age hammer to knock a nail into the wall, after all, it's been doing it for ages! I have always given more credit to the inventive skills of homo sapiens to improve and better themselves.

There have been attempts to revive Pascal. I can quote applications such as Free Pascal, GNU Pascal and Borland's Delphi. But can these really compare with Visual Basic (VB). In VB the student actually uses Object Oriented programming to construct Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). Turbo Pascal still utilises Command Line Interface (CLI), not to mention inherited problems with Pascal and modern operating systems that shun DOS applications, requiring the need for the user to have a basic knowledge of CLI or else to get someone to write a batch file (.bat) and hopefully this will work.

I think that we have to adapt our teaching to technological trends; OO programming is the in thing. We need to change our basic learning platforms using scripts that are similar to modern applications.

Loops will be loops in any application, and if Smartcity = True then Visual Studio.NET could be our winning language package. Let us not also forget that many students already have this package which was supplied with the Malta government's agreement with Microsoft.

Programming can only be understood by 10 people in the world, those who understand Binary and those who do not.