Years ago I wrote a Pascal interpreter in #swiftlang so I thought, why not try making it an iOS app. Pascal is still taught at some school as the first programming language and the retro theme is just so nostalgic. #iosdev
@igorkulman I have memories of Geneva 12 and bold keywords 🙂
@igorkulman @krzyzanowskim Neat. I wish Apple still supported non-Apple languages out-of-the box. Would prefer Pascal/Modula-2 over Swift. ;)
@krzyzanowskim @igorkulman lol. Is this a competition to see who can name the most obscure language they’ve actually used? Yup, played with Ada. ;)
@SergKoren @igorkulman I was introduced to Ada at the Uni when we discussed parallelism and whatnot. I found it nice
@krzyzanowskim @igorkulman It was cool, even for a government language. I got into true parallelism on Tandem/HP NonStop computers with TAL. (A very obscure language). That was my professional career for almost 50 years ;) Showing my age.
@SergKoren @krzyzanowskim I guess I should aim the app at nostalgic people like me seeing this discussion :)
@igorkulman @krzyzanowskim Make it work on a Mac/cross-platform, that’s where real development lives. Anyone remember TML Pascal?
@SergKoren I really don't know which of the languages I used is the most obscure - Forth? Prolog? Snobol? Modula-2? Smalltalk?
@blotosmetek Cool. Never did Snobol.
@blotosmetek Probably Snobol ;) FORTH/Modula2/Smalltak were fairly well known/published.
@SergKoren @krzyzanowskim @igorkulman Old languages: Algol, FORTRAN IV and V, APL, Pl/1, COBOL.
Helped getting a Pascal compiler running on our mainframe sometime around 1976, was on the standards committee up here for Ada, but not for long... it was a rubber stamp operation and boring as hell.
@alan @krzyzanowskim @igorkulman Cool. Never did PL/1. Seems like old guys were there before AI. ;)

@SergKoren @krzyzanowskim @igorkulman Hey, at the time I was working on early AI: a recursive descent natural language parser written in Pascal, and the first work on neural nets had already been published by then.

It's more accurate to say before a bunch of VC's started pushing AI as a product when it should still be in research labs until it works well enough to not be a force of destruction.

@alan @krzyzanowskim @igorkulman Neat. I wrote on of the first chatbots on Compuserve, which pretended to be a user in chat. I guess that would be considered AI nowadays :/
@SergKoren @krzyzanowskim @igorkulman All depends on whether or not there was some sort of inference engine in there. Otherwise it's just a really cool FSM.
@alan @krzyzanowskim @igorkulman yeah, it was a combination of FSM with rudimentary language brute-force processing. Not very "intelligent", but could pretend to converse and maintain a bit of conversational context. Also, had a bit of randomness thrown in to initiate chats.
@SergKoren @krzyzanowskim @igorkulman It's funny. In "The Emperor's New Mind", Roger Penrose attempted to prove that AGI was computationally impossible, and my response to his hypothesis was "nothing a random number generator couldn't fix."
@alan @krzyzanowskim @igorkulman lol. What matters is that human behavior appears random to other humans (even if it isn't computationally so).
@igorkulman Pascal was my first language in college, and although I don’t think I remember the syntax well enough to write it now, looking at that example code, I am impressed with how well-structured the language is. Many thanks to my CS101 professor, Dr. Kudlick.
@igorkulman where do they still teach Pascal as a first language? I wasn’t aware it was being used hardly at all outside of Delphi, since at least the 1990s
@kaced I was basic that on my time in university which was well, long time ago. I see now they already switched to Python.

@igorkulman "Pascal is still taught at some school"... and still seriously and widespreadly used in production. Though it's called Object Pascal since like >20 yrs back. I have KILLED C++ implementations using it recently.

https://www.freepascal.org/
https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi
https://www.delphitools.info/dwscript/

Free Pascal - Advanced open source Pascal compiler for Pascal and Object Pascal - Home Page

@igorkulman that nostalgia hit so hard. Pascal was my first formal programming class.
@igorkulman The moment the retro theme kicked in it became perfect. 😁
@igorkulman That TP/BP theme is some serious nostalgia hit.