Is object pascal a dead language?

Yes, very much so. In the 80's and early 90's it was very popular and a lot of DOS BBS stuff was written in Turbo Pascal. Also some games and demoscene stuff, although those tended to use lots of inline asm as well, except maybe for stuff that didn't need max optimization, like design tools for example.

Free Pascal is still one of the easiest low-level languages. I've never met anyone who tried it and went back to C++.
Just look at the download numbers of Lazarus IDE, and compare it to other top projects distributed on sourceforge:
7zip 34,966 Downloads (This Week) sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzip
MPC-HC 15,357 Downloads (This Week) sourceforge.net/projects/mpc-hc/
Lazarus 12,145 Downloads (This Week) sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus/
Clonezilla 11,059 Downloads (This Week) sourceforge.net/projects/clonezilla/

I don't think it is dead.

One word:

FASHION.

It's not hip. If it's not hip, there isn't enough people (and software companies, which is more important) to support it. Without support, its rich and streamlined Visual Component Library (which is a parallel hierarchy of objects reflecting the native one) becomes outdated.

It's a good language and Lazarus is a good IDE but they don't advertise that much. I think more people would use it if they tried it. A lot of languages have the same problem.

I used both Pascal and C++. Yet I am doing things in C++, not pascal. C++ has more libraries and bindings to do many things. Also I do not like "begin" and "end" instead of { }

How about me? I'm and last used Pascal in the '90s.

is pascal a meme?
why did it lose with c and c++?

No.
UNIX and Windows chose C and C++ respectively.

Freepascal is still plenty good enough to make games though. If someone doesn't want to jump into the undefined bahavior mess of C, they still have other options besides just scripting languages.

Mainly because the rest of the world had gone with C. But that wasn't just fashion as it was difficult to write low-level software (normal software at the time) in Pascal without mixing in assembly to get around the type system. When mixing in assembly stopped being acceptible (this used to be quite normal on PCs) so did Pascal.
Academia was very angry about this (UCLA in the early '90s only taught Pascal) but academia has a hard time dealing with the fact that people want to actually MAKE things, not wank about type systems.

Who put it in your heads that undefined behavior is bad? I swear this shit only showed up in the last 2-3 years. It's a feature not a bug, and it's why C is so fast while still being portable. It's what allowed us to replace almost all assembly in an OS.

Fixing old crusty code that stopped working (sometimes in spectacular ways) when they upgraded or changed hardware, OS, or compiler. Not my code, just stuff I ended up maintaining.
Also reading Usenet posts long ago where "expert C" dudes got Real Tough and lashed out at n00bs who hadn't yet memorized the ISO standard.
Also countless CVEs related to undefined behavior.

Bad code is bad code no matter the language. PHP has none of the undefined behavior you're terrified of yet it's the king of CVE for all time.

Did anyone other than Apple really go with Pascal? It's a shame they dumped it partway through creating Object Pascal, when they were transitioning to PPC.

Probably PHP has lots of CVEs because it's where the people with zero programming experience start with (right after they learn HTML and think they're programmers). So they're going to make lots of mistakes. But they would have an even harder time and make even more mistakes with C.

Yeah, Borland's Delphi was very popular on Windows for a long time. I guess it's still used in some places, and you can still buy it apparently. Maybe it lost some market due to C#, but before that it was a good alternative for people who didn't want the extra complication of C or C++.

1. Compilers are interpreting it in stupid ways.
2. It's possible to do the same things without it (see Ada).

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140627-00/?p=633

Delphi was the hot thing in 199something. The good thing was that they sent the code of all their components with the IDE. I learned a lot about windows api and how to make visual components looking their code.

Why don't the people who worry about UB compile with optimization disabled?

Compilers can still break things anyway and most optimizations are still useful since they have nothing to do with UB.

Broken code was broken before the compiler touched it. I don't understand the obsession with this. Bad logic is going to fuck up no matter how it's compiled or what language is used. Automated testing is the correct solution.

It was technically sound but the greedy fucks at Borland mismanaged it into the ground. It's one of the great failure stories of the 90s computer industry, up there with Commodore

Corel was another impressive fuckup.

tell me you still have the original IDE and compiler
I've had no luck reversing 16 bit code abandon ware from the era

Not that user, but I used to crack stuff in the 16 bit DOS days. It should be very easy with modern tools. The hardest thing back then was writing TSRs that had to patch several overlay loads with anti-TSR code to get to the right code (many programs loaded one 64KiB page at a time almost like a multi-stage bootloader today).

Enlighten me?

I'm confused as to what you're looking for. Where did custom compilers and unrecognized CPU architectures come from? Turbo Pascal on DOS was about as basic as it gets without literally being basic.

Maybe this helps you understand,
$ echo -en "\xcd\x21" > foo.com && objdump -D -b binary -m i8086 foo.comfoo.com: file format binaryDisassembly of section .data:00000000 : 0: cd 21 int $0x21

Is pascal still a horrible language? Way back in the 90s I learned how to program on Macs. Half of their APIs used pascal strings and the other half used C strings, and you constantly had to convert them back and forth. Also callbacks in the Carbon API, callbacks everywhere. I'm pretty sure most of the APIs werent even asynchronous, they just wanted to you to use callbacks because fuck you.

If you dont know what a pascal string is/was, the first byte would be the length of the string followed by the data.

What'd they do if the string was longer than 255 bytes?

Use more strings.

I dont recall, this was 20 years ago. For a lot of APIs I think you were fucked and had to write your own code if you really needed to do this. This was also a time before free IDEs on the mac (as far as I knew), and piracy was difficult. I had to buy a book to get a shitty edition of Metrowerks's IDE

fuck me, it was even longer than that now that I think about it, this was the 68k days.

And if you want to see some of the bullshit you had to deal with

mikeash.com/pyblog/the-mac-toolbox-followup.html