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Pascal gets an underserved bad reputation. I am showing my age but Turbo Pascal was (is) great. Extensions from Turbo and Delphi Object Pascal is great as well

Pascal gets an underserved bad reputation. I am showing my age but Turbo Pascal was (is) great. Extensions from Turbo and Delphi Object Pascal is great as well. I hate the insane pricing Embarcado has imposed on Delphi. They have had cross platform GUIs in Delphi for a long time. Something for some reason other tools struggle and mostly fail to do. I have not been able to "sell" it to clients mostly due to price.

ak39 4y ago
Embarcadero insane pricing of Delphi is the reason I haven't continued beyond my old version Xe2. I guess they are making hay while the sun shines with the locked-in customers.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  Do they have the yellow-on-blue syntax highlighting trademarked or something? I've looked for vim and vscode color schemes to match the original turbo c++ but to no avail. I remember borland builder had a setting to switch back to it.
  - ragingrobot 4y ago
    Probably no one else saw interest to do it? I do remember seeing something similar for emacs.
  - zem 4y ago
    I've definitely used turbo c vim themes in the past. a quick Google search brings up https://github.com/caglartoklu/borlandp.vim https://github.com/caglartoklu/borlandp.vim and some others
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      That's a nice color scheme, but what really made those text-mode IDE's intuitive was the TUI widgets and support for multiple views. Probably easier to do in neovim than plain old vi/vim of course. With modern devtooling support as found in neovim you could also have inline help, which was also very useful in those older environments.
- Peter5 4y ago
  In these days, Lazarus and FPC are a valid choice instead of Delphi, except when you are doing some heavy component based codes, like organization oriented projects. Plus side is Lazarus can produce a project and UI for almost any OS.
  - nurettin 4y ago
    I would jump back to fpc/lazarus after twenty years if devexpress supported it.
    - ak39 4y ago
      100%. My projects are DevExpress heavy.
klodolph 4y ago
I think this was a reason for C’s success back in the day. If C compilers were a little cheaper and easier to get, then they’d completely take over, long-term. I remember that Pascal was the norm for Mac programming for a time during the late 1980s or so. You could use THINK Pascal (later Symantec) or MPW Pascal. Pretty soon everyone was programming in C and compiling their programs with Metrowerks CodeWarrior.
- narag 4y ago
  I think this was a reason for C’s success back in the day. Nop, more like the other way around in the 80's. Before, there were two reasons: lack of a standard (Pascal was a learning language, not intended for professional use) and the VM fever: very often so-called P-Code systems were the quick and dirty way to have a programming language for a new system. The result was slow, incompatible, cumbersome access to machine resources. C was always compiled and had a clear standard that included direct memory access. Also UNIX. But in the 80s, TurboPascal was $50, had everything that C had + an IDE + compiled x100 faster. Later there was a nice text-mode GUI (TurboVision), then Delphi. Microsoft defused it poaching most Borland talent.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > lack of a standard (Pascal was a learning language, not intended for professional use) The parenthetical is correct, what is outside is not; Pascal had a standard (ISO 7185:1983), but the standard lacks features needed for serious use, so Pascal implementations were either standard and hobbled or useful but not interoperable.
    - narag 4y ago
      Pascal had a standard (ISO 7185:1983) Doesn't "1983" tell you something? I don't mean to snark. Maybe my comment wasn't clear enough. I've talked of two different periods: the first in the seventies, the second in the eighties and later. The starndar was late. By that time, it wasn't needed because the only Pascal that was widely used was Borland's.
deleted 4y ago
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pkphilip 4y ago
Well said. If not for the insane pricing and the fact that Delphi does not run on non-Windows platforms, it is a great product with a basically unmatched GUI app development capability

ak39 4y ago

Embarcadero insane pricing of Delphi is the reason I haven't continued beyond my old version Xe2. I guess they are making hay while the sun shines with the locked-in customers.

galangalalgol 4y ago
Do they have the yellow-on-blue syntax highlighting trademarked or something? I've looked for vim and vscode color schemes to match the original turbo c++ but to no avail. I remember borland builder had a setting to switch back to it.
- ragingrobot 4y ago
  Probably no one else saw interest to do it? I do remember seeing something similar for emacs.
- zem 4y ago
  I've definitely used turbo c vim themes in the past. a quick Google search brings up https://github.com/caglartoklu/borlandp.vim https://github.com/caglartoklu/borlandp.vim and some others
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    That's a nice color scheme, but what really made those text-mode IDE's intuitive was the TUI widgets and support for multiple views. Probably easier to do in neovim than plain old vi/vim of course. With modern devtooling support as found in neovim you could also have inline help, which was also very useful in those older environments.
Peter5 4y ago
In these days, Lazarus and FPC are a valid choice instead of Delphi, except when you are doing some heavy component based codes, like organization oriented projects. Plus side is Lazarus can produce a project and UI for almost any OS.
- nurettin 4y ago
  I would jump back to fpc/lazarus after twenty years if devexpress supported it.
  - ak39 4y ago
    100%. My projects are DevExpress heavy.

klodolph 4y ago

I think this was a reason for C’s success back in the day. If C compilers were a little cheaper and easier to get, then they’d completely take over, long-term. I remember that Pascal was the norm for Mac programming for a time during the late 1980s or so. You could use THINK Pascal (later Symantec) or MPW Pascal. Pretty soon everyone was programming in C and compiling their programs with Metrowerks CodeWarrior.

narag 4y ago
I think this was a reason for C’s success back in the day. Nop, more like the other way around in the 80's. Before, there were two reasons: lack of a standard (Pascal was a learning language, not intended for professional use) and the VM fever: very often so-called P-Code systems were the quick and dirty way to have a programming language for a new system. The result was slow, incompatible, cumbersome access to machine resources. C was always compiled and had a clear standard that included direct memory access. Also UNIX. But in the 80s, TurboPascal was $50, had everything that C had + an IDE + compiled x100 faster. Later there was a nice text-mode GUI (TurboVision), then Delphi. Microsoft defused it poaching most Borland talent.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > lack of a standard (Pascal was a learning language, not intended for professional use) The parenthetical is correct, what is outside is not; Pascal had a standard (ISO 7185:1983), but the standard lacks features needed for serious use, so Pascal implementations were either standard and hobbled or useful but not interoperable.
  - narag 4y ago
    Pascal had a standard (ISO 7185:1983) Doesn't "1983" tell you something? I don't mean to snark. Maybe my comment wasn't clear enough. I've talked of two different periods: the first in the seventies, the second in the eighties and later. The starndar was late. By that time, it wasn't needed because the only Pascal that was widely used was Borland's.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

pkphilip 4y ago

Well said. If not for the insane pricing and the fact that Delphi does not run on non-Windows platforms, it is a great product with a basically unmatched GUI app development capability