How do you choose your programming language ?

OK, I do not want to start a language war, but I want to give a side
that most of you do not see.

As many of you know, my favorite programming language is FPC (Free
Pascal Compiler). Now before you are going to say a lot (usually
wrong, but some negative things on the language are true.. don't get
me wrong) things about the language, let me give you some of my point
of view about the myths about the language or at least two of them...

Usually I'm getting answers such as "Yes we learn Pascal at school, so
we know that language". But thats wrong to say. When I learned at high
school (wow it was something like 9-10 years ago) Pascal, I didn't
really learn the language except for some few basic commands, such as
"read/ln, write/ln, math operators, condition statements, functions,
array constant and loop handling". Yes these are only basic stuff of
the language, and the language have so much more to offer. I learned a
lot about the language by downloading programs from BBS, books and a
lot of reading and not understanding of help documents and source
codes back then. :)

The motto of Pascal programming is "make the hardest thing to be
easy". Thats why documents such as "why not to use Pascal" wrote
things such as "Everyone could write programs if they will use Pascal,
we should continue using COBOL/Fortran". And thats just for the preview ;)

The part that most of us never learned at high school or universities
with Pascal, was that since Turbo Pascal 5.5 (If I remember correctly
came out at 86 or 87) had some basic Object Oriented support, but with
full constructor inheritance, and Turbo Pascal 3 (came out in 82 I
think) started also to support direct memory access (you can not do
that in protected mode, but I'm talking about making variables
addressed to segment and offset of memory calls instead of just using
the *OS* interrupts).

As you can see here, we did not learned all of that. Now I can move
along to FPC 2, that came out this year.

This compiler is one of the fastest compilers exists at the Open
source arsenal (yes much faster then gcc, VC, BCB, but not faster then
Delphi that uses threads to compile, while FPC does not).

FPC and Delphi supports a lot of actions and ways to do things, that
sometimes are not the same as C or C++, because it require different
approach, but when you know how to use the language, you find out,
that sometimes on C++ you will write a whole class to implement things
that on Delphi/FPC you will write only two lines of code to do the
same (Unless you really love to write classes, and then you can do the
same solution you made in C++ or Java).

FPC gives you a lot of ways to use classes, and other language tools
such as AnsiString that will give you the feeling of a script language
rather then a strict compiled programing language.
If you wish to use a function inside a class for example, that does
not require the class to be created/initialized, you can call the
function directly without creating the class itself.
The AnsiString type supports a very long string (if I remember
correctly, it can store up to 4 mega of string by default), the
compiler places code that handle length checking, so you do not need
to wary about buffer overflows, and it works much father then Null
terminated strings. 

Hows that for the first myth ? (I have a lot more to say about this
myth such as a very flexible use of assembly language and controlling
variable names at assembly/compiled use, creating dynamic libraries by
changing headers, using the source code to give instructions to the
compiler, including linking libraries and much much more, but lets
stop at this point).

So, why don't you use Pascal if only part of what I say is true (and
all of it is true :P) ? First of all I think it's the name and the
connection of the name you have for "Pascal". 

Secondly The industry takes only languages that was giving to them
after chowing and a lot of money investment on them (take Java and C#
as two examples). 

I'm starting to hear "but no one really uses this language". Many
people uses Windows, many developers write programs with buffer
overflows, and most of them do not try to understand whats going on
with things that they did not pay money to know, and things that no
one gave them to swallow the chowed information. And thats true also
for many popular languages, when people does not really know anything,
but think they are the smartest people on the plant, at least on
everything that regarded to what they suppose to know. People still
give more credits to diploma (do you want to buy one instead of
learning ? I know some good bulk mail that offers that :P) then to
people that actually learned things... Most of you in this forum knows
that from first hand experience.

So, if you know that there is a tool that can give you more power and
less work, will you use it ? it seems that it's the wrong question. 

So how do you choose your programming language, and will you use FPC
if it will not have the name Pascal inside, but will deliver you a
faster code development and and more stable code, in less time then
C#, Java, C, C++, VB and others ?

P.S.
If I'm sounds like attacking or making fights, here, then I'm sorry
from a head.. thats not my intention. 






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