Ease of maintaining and reading code:
As you can see, there's really just a few syntax differences here, yet Pascal can be so much easier on the eyes when looking at a full screen of code. It isn't as apparent on this cheat sheet, since we are only looking at small snippets of code. The rumor of Pascal being "so verbose" is not true, if you just look at the chart above and compare. i.e. the amount of line space, typing, and shift-keys required in PHP to perform a simple for loop is verbose and obfuscated! Symbols look terse, but sometimes are actually more verbose in the end. The 'begin' and 'end' keywords are more verbose than parenthesis, but the parenthesis are very hard to see on a high resolution monitor today. There are no shift keys required to type 'begin' and 'end', so a little added momentum there in your coding compared to parenthesis.
The brackets and parenthesis in PHP can make it appear more ugly on a full screen of code (check it out in your text editor. It's not apparent here) while really not saving text editor space in the end. The ugliness and amount of shift keys you have to perform just to use a for loop or while condition can get on your nerves when programming PHP, because every bracket, parenthesis, is in an awkward shift-key position on the keyboard. The brackets and parenthesis which require the shift-key can ruin your momentum, since you sometimes have to think twice about what you are doing in PHP, whereas in Pascal it rolls out smoothly as you pronounce and rhythm your code aloud.
True that the colon equal combination (:=) in Pascal requires a shift key, but it adds some clarity to the code. Whereas PHP/C symbols actually decrease clarity, in many cases. i.e. in the for loop, tons of symbols are used, which don't add to clarity, or don't really shorten the amount of typing in the end, if you compare side by side. The dollar symbols are not used in Pascal either. (Dollar symbols are used sometimes in template files when doing web programming with Pascal).
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