Dolphin Bay Software Ezy Pascal

Though not the first programming language I learnt, Pascal was the first in which I was formally educated. It’s a nice language, simple and well structured.

Many of today’s programming languages lack rigid structure, or at least don’t jump to enforce it. While this opens up new and exciting ways of doing things, it can make it harder when you’re first starting out. If there are a thousand ways to do something, and everyone in the class is using a different one, working in teams or asking for help can be a little difficult.

Pascal forces you to do things the “right way” (its way) – declare your constants here, your variables there, keep everything nice and neat. Whether or not that resembles the language you end up working in, it can be a nice way to get started.

Whatever language you use, the development environment itself often presents an early stumbling block. It’s like trying to teach someone statistics using Excel, when they’ve never used a spreadsheet application before. They might be fine with statistics, if they could just figure out how to edit a formula or create a graph.

Ezy Pascal is just what it sounds like: an easy-to-use development environment for the Pascal language. Tailored specifically for learners, it has no use outside of academia. The language is interpreted only – this means the code you create is run step-by-step within the development environment. It can’t be compiled into a standalone application to share with others that don’t have Ezy Pascal.

The development environment consists of just three panes: Program, Text Output and Graphics Output. Switching between these is easy with the large, captioned toolbar or the simple menu bar. Everything that makes up your program is visible in one place – things couldn’t be much easier for a programming student.

The included reference material – in the form of help files – is comprehensive; certainly enough to get me back up to speed with Pascal (it’s been a while). It might not be simple enough for a blank-slate beginner to wade through, but would be fine supplemented with a little in-class instruction.

Ezy Pascal’s debugging tools, used for stepping through and fixing up code, are reasonable. It’s easy enough to set breakpoints where your program stops for you to examine what’s going on, and to view the value of variables as the program runs. The syntax checker is also up to scratch – if you make a mistake in the Pascal syntax, the location and nature of the mistake is pointed out to you when you try to run the code. This is all pretty stock standard stuff, but I’ve seen some rather disappointing teaching environments over the years. Ezy Pascal is definitely one of the better ones.