I just needed a feature of Pascal yesterday in one of my Rust libraries: ranged integers. I know, you can go about it in different ways, like structs with private fields and custom constructors, or just with a new generic type. But, having the ability to specify that some integer can only be between 15..25 built-in is a fantastic language feature. That's even so with runtime bounds checking disabled because the compiler would still complain about some subset of violations.
What an innovator and a role model. I wish I can be as passionate about my work in my 80's as him.
Not only did Pascal (TP more precisely) taught me about systems programming with a safer language, it was also my first foray into type driven programming, learning to use the type system to express conditions not bound to happen.
Ranged numerics and enumerations were part of that.
What an innovator and a role model. I wish I can be as passionate about my work in my 80's as him.