If you liked Borland Pascal/Delphi then check out Free Pascal/Lazarus. If nothing else, it is growing (a bit too much if you ask me, but it isn't the monster th

If you liked Borland Pascal/Delphi then check out Free Pascal/Lazarus. If nothing else, it is growing (a bit too much if you ask me, but it isn't the monster that C++ is - yet). The main star of the show here is Lazarus which is basically a cross platform Delphi with support for the native widgets for each platform (on Linux you can choose between Gtk+ and Qt). Another alternative is D, which is basically C++ minus a few warts, the option to have a somewhat faster compiler (all modern C++ compilers are very slow) but it wasn't made yesterday so it has accumulated its own cruft (most common being that most of the new "flags" for declarations being in the form of "@stuff" instead of just "stuff" even though some older stuff being just "stuff" so things look a bit messy - in a similar vein, the new supposedly best practice, especially for libraries, is for functions to be pure and nogc, but this isn't the default so you have to put the declarations everywhere). Still, it is the most obvious choice for someone who wants a better language than C++ without changing too much. There is also Rust, but i don't know about it.