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Article:		What I Hate About Your Programming Language
Subject:		Ideal language: Delphi w/ Clarion influence
Date:		2003-05-14 12:56:38
From:		anonymous2

I'd love to see a delphi language/environment with Clarion's syntax for blocks, ifs, loops, and lack of the semi-colon terminator in favor of new-line. Clarion's syntax is the cleanest I've seen for these basic elements. Check out this Clarion code: if x = y ! number of statements doesn't matter SomeProc('sdf', a) loop i = 1 to 5 p = x * i Message('p is ' & p) end elsif x > 3 ! all loops start with 'loop' loop while x = 3 and SomeFunc(x) a = b * c + sin(b+c) Message('a is ' & a) end elsif y = 4 and blah ! anumericvar is converted to string Message(anumericvar) else halt('aarrgh!', -1) end No semi-colons and you don't need begin..end in some cases and not in others. Clarion dynamically converts between strings and numbers, and, as a 'general purpose' business language, returns 0 when dividing by zero instead of throwing an error. It supports file structure and window structure declarations (in the language itself) and is a natively event-driven language, with window event loops as just another type of loop in the language syntax. Unfortunately, all these neat features are much less flexible in the long term than the library based ways of Delphi.

Showing messages 1 through 3 of 3.

Ideal language: Delphi w/ Clarion influence
2003-05-16 12:27:29 anonymous2 [View]

Sadly Delphi/Kylix (Object Pascal) is often overlooked. Perl, Ruby, etc. are all find for scripts, but in most cases, a compiiled program in a better way to do. Delphi lets you program procedurally like C, or with Objects like C++, only the union is much more natural. It prevents you from making many stupid mistakes, while allowing you 99.9% of the power C has. It borrows some syntax from perhaps better languages (Oberon, Modula, etc.), but has a much bigger and more useful standard library. (Unofficially, anyway...)

stupid thing deleted my indentation
2003-05-14 12:58:41 anonymous2 [View]

Ok, my code in that last post did originally have indentation on the code, the posting mechanism deleted it for some dumbass reason.