I have a rather different opinion on OP that it has a needlessly verbose syntax.
Pythonic it is definitely not. Even C# (which is another creation of Anders Hejlsberg, after MS poached him from Borland) has a better, readable and concise syntax.
I used to be a Delphi evangelist in it's glory days. Now I bristle when I read Pascal source code, there's so much unnecessary visual noise. Of course if your brain is habituated enough to parse Pascal code, eventually you will tend to filter out the begin..end's.
Pascal syntax belongs to C family of language.
As regards to Python-like syntax, I think you are referring to the Nim language, whose syntax happens to be similar to that of Pascal.
There are specific differences that set them apart, too. For example, the fact that Pascal has statement separators rather than statement terminators (and using a separator in a terminal position is usually an error, e.g. before "else").
Pascal rather belongs to the Algol family of languages, together with C. Algol-60 is where "begin" and "end" come from.
Ex-Delphi developer (10 years) - still do some maintenance...
The verbosity is an indicator that it does not require a huge cliff of learning to understand the syntax. (It also means the compiler can absolutely fly, which Delphi did.)
I like the conciseness of later language structures, but they all need to be learnt in order to read or write in them.
The only solution to the verbosity of Delphi was to increase your typing speed or use an IDE add-in that provided shortcuts :)
So I suppose my argument is that the syntax is not needlessly verbose. The verbosity helped the speed of compilation by the simplicity of its grammar, and the learnability of the language is quite speedy as a result of fewer grammatical options.
My feeling as well. In my heart I am really happy that Lazarus (and Harbour, the Clipper-compatible compiler) exist, but being rational the days of desktop applications are over.
Python is being run on microcontrollers these days; I actually wrestle with the non-adoption of Python (or Ruby, or Javascript, or Tcl) as 1st-class citizen language for desktop and mobile; it does not make sense for me. Certainly writing desktop/web apps in C++ or Pascal make even less sense.
Perhaps I am forgetting the big number of fellow developers that work on ERP systems and outdated software, for them it is a blessing to have free tools, while in the 90s such a tool could cost $3k.
> My feeling as well. In my heart I am really happy that Lazarus (and Harbour, the Clipper-compatible compiler) exist, but being rational the days of desktop applications are over.
Oh boy, I hadn't heard about Harbour until now; earlier today I was looking at the Wikipedia page for id Tech 5, and it says it uses Clipper so I was really scratching my head wondering how they pulled that off and why. Now I know, thanks for mentioning it. :- )
But looking at other edits from this address it sees like they might just be a vandal; or at least somebody who is very confused about how Wikipedia works.
One of the main points that makes me happy about Pascal syntax compared to some C-family langs like Java is that types are placed AFTER the variable names, making it much easier to scan the left border of the editor for meaningful info.
Happy that recent languages like Go and Kotlin have learned the lesson and are going the Pascal way again.
FWIW, I took over maintenance of an in-house application written in Delpi/ObjectPascal, with practically no prior experience with Pascal (but one fun weekend looking at Ada), and I had almost no problems reading the code that were caused by Pascal's syntax. It might be because the guy initially wrote the application did a good job, but I found the code very easy to read.
I have a rather different opinion on OP that it has a needlessly verbose syntax.
Pythonic it is definitely not. Even C# (which is another creation of Anders Hejlsberg, after MS poached him from Borland) has a better, readable and concise syntax.
I used to be a Delphi evangelist in it's glory days. Now I bristle when I read Pascal source code, there's so much unnecessary visual noise. Of course if your brain is habituated enough to parse Pascal code, eventually you will tend to filter out the begin..end's.
Pascal syntax belongs to C family of language.
As regards to Python-like syntax, I think you are referring to the Nim language, whose syntax happens to be similar to that of Pascal.