Free Pascal

I'm old guard, learned Pascal as my second (class of) language in the early nineties on the TRS-80.

I've learned and professionally coded in many dozen languages since then, but I'm finding that I get sick of the constant meaningful punctuation (such as curly braces, semicolons) and abbreviations (sub, def, func, fun, etc) that I have to memorize and that's always different between different languages. I miss the days of fully spelled out English words as primary language constructs.

So if I wanted to code either for the Linux command line or for Windows with support for creating GUIs (or for something that compiles down into JS or WASM for front end web use) (also not needing something that does all three, just something that lives in at least one

My son tried researching this a bit, and all he could report back was that there was some version of Pascal that was ~20 years old and could only be obtained through an untrusted distribution site with viruses or something like that. Not sure which variant he might have found or whether said concerns had any meat to them, but my skimming today suggests that there are a dozen or more options out there and I'd like to see which have the best reputation and support.

EDIT: Consensus seems to be FPC+Lazurus with Delphi as a close second.

A friend of mine made 3D Clipboard in Delphi a metric forever ago, so it's good to know that platform remains relevant. But I'll check out FPC+Laz first.

Thank y'all for your quick responses! 😁