If only Delphi was not so expensive.[0] Having inherited maintenance of an in-house application written in Delphi, one thing I really come to love about Delphi

If only Delphi was not so expensive.[0] Having inherited maintenance of an in-house application written in Delphi, one thing I really come to love about Delphi is that there have been no nasty surprises from the syntax side. This might not sound like much of a compliment, but people who have had to decipher overly clever C or Perl code[1] will probably agree this a huge bonus. [0] I know, there is Free Pascal and Lazarus. I took both for a spin, hoping it might help me get to know Delphi, but Lazarus has crashed on me so frequently I quickly gave up. [1] Or C++, I guess. The only C++ code I have had to look at was really more like C + MFC and was devoid of any excessive cleverness and a marble of clarity. I imagine there are many crawling horrors out there written in C++, but I have never seen one myself.