Why use Pascal with Cocoa/Cocoa Touch?

Question

I'm surprised to find that it might be possible to use Pascal with the Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks. This is an interesting turn of events, as Pascal was the favored language for Mac development for a short while early in the history of Macintosh.

It looks like someone has gone to a lot of trouble to make Pascal work with Objective-C frameworks like Cocoa and Cocoa Touch, but I'm not sure I see the point. Is this mainly a refuge for Pascal developers coming from other development environments like Delphi, or are there compelling reasons to use Pascal in place of Objective-C or other languages.

I don't mean to ask which language is "better." I'm just wondering if there's a reason beyond language preference that one would choose to use Pascal for MacOS X or iOS development.

Answer 1

Some reasons beyond preference for picking a different language:

• you or the other developers working on the project with you have more experience of the other language than of the vendor's preferred language
• your project can benefit from libraries or other reusable code that's available when you use the other language
• the vendor of the other language is providing some incentive like cost reduction or support
• the tools available for working with the other language make you more efficient than the tools available for working with the vendor's preferred language

The Cocoa APIs are of course developed by the same company that drives the definition of the Objective-C language, and the two fit together very well. But that doesn't mean you should eschew all other languages when working with Objective-C; the runtime is very easy to integrate with other languages so there have been "Objective-*" products available since the 1990s.