Akl-O-Hosh Nami Danum
“Akl-O-Hosh Nami Danum” – this is a line from ‘Deewangi’ (Om Shanti Om), which would roughly transliterate to “I don’t know where my mind and senses are”, or simply that I’ve lost both my mind and my senses.
That is just how I feel, having been called upon to code Windows API functionality in Pascal over the past couple of days. Yes, you read that right. Pascal. Derived straight from ALGOL, and the grand-daddy of Delphi. I mean, who the fuck codes anything in Pascal any more? I learnt programming with LOGO and BASIC, and directly went on to C. Never took a formal course, so never looked back.
But no, custom scripting in Inno Setup is solely in Pascal. So when I wanted to customize my installer I had to delve into the archaic mysteries of this ’structured’ language.
I just hope I don’t have to use COBOL soon – I’ve seen Computer students at my college using it before the syllabus was changed. Boy, does that make me feel ancient!
There’s another old language (ADA) which I might be interested in shortly though, since I read about how it was used to break the German (circa WWII) Lorenz cipher before the Colossus computer in a rematch of sorts. Which other language compiles ‘Hello World’ to a 1.5MB file? Ah well, at least ADA is used currently in interesting applications.