Pascal

Pascal was designed by Nicolas Wirth in the early 70's, because he was dismayed to see that FORTRAN and COBOL were not enforcing healthy structured programming disciplines in students. "Spaghetti code" was becoming the norm, and the languages of the time weren't discouraging it. Pascal was designed from the ground up to enforce structured programming practices. While the original Pascal was designed strictly for teaching, it had enough advocates to eventually make inroads into commercial programming. Pascal finally took the spotlight in a big way when Borland released Turbo Pascal for the IBM PC. The integrated editor, lightning-fast compiler, and low price were an irresistible combination, and Pascal became the preferred language for writing small programs for MS-DOS.

The momentum, however, did not stay. C compilers became faster and got nice built-in editors and debuggers. The almost-final nail in Pascal's coffin happened in the early 1990's when Windows took over, and Borland ignored Pascal in favor of C++ for writing Windows applications. Turbo Pascal was all but forgotten.

Finally, in 1996, Borland released its "Visual Basic Killer", Delphi. Delphi was a fast Pascal compiler coupled with a gorgeous user interface. Against all odds (and the Visual Basic juggernaut), it gained a lot of fans.

On the whole, Pascal is simpler than C. While the syntax is similar, it lacks a lot of the shortcut operations that C has. This is a good thing and a bad thing. It's harder to write inscrutable "clever" code, but it makes low-level operations like bit-manipulation more difficult.

Advantages: Easy to learn. Platform-specific implementations (Delphi) are very nice.

Disadvantages: "World class" OO successors to Pascal (Modula, Oberon) have not been successful. Language standards are not adhered to by compiler-makers. Proprietary.

Portability: Dismal. The features of the language changes from platform to platform, and there are no portability toolkits to handle platform-specific features.

Games Written in Pascal: A couple. The DirectX components for Delphi have made the playing field more level.

Resources: The find out about Delphi, check out the Inprise Delphi page.

Visual Basic