> And old Delphi Pascal suffers from similar things as 90ies C or C++: it skips modern features and uses a style that is contrary to what people now learn, expe

> And old Delphi Pascal suffers from similar things as 90ies C or C++: it skips modern features and uses a style that is contrary to what people now learn, expect or even enforce. Eh, even Delphi 1 has a lot more features than modern C and while there are new features added in Free Pascal over the years, the old stuff never got outdated or obsolete the same way that (theoretically) nobody writes C++98 (though in practice many do anyway, but they do it at night, hidden from all eyes :-P). Pretty much all Delphi-like Object Pascal compilers (Delphi itself, Free Pascal, Oxygen and i think a couple of others) use Delphi 7 as a common denominator and the main thing missing from Delphi 7 as a language is support for generics (but it still has a few collection classes). If you read a book about even, say, Delphi 3, most of it (outside the Borland-specific database stuff) will be valid in Lazarus. You'll just miss some additional features modern Free Pascal and Lazarus provides, but the older stuff aren't really obsolete or invalidated (this is also a neat thing about Free Pascal and Lazarus - the time you invest in learning them won't be wasted because the developers decided that now they'll try to do the same stuff but in a different way).