4 ms·

"the robust and easy-to-learn Delphi language" Which is Pascal, isn't it?

notimetorelax 4y ago
Pretty much, with pointers and Objects. Delphi is actually surprisingly easy to learn and the environment allows to put something together very quickly.
- ShadowBanThis01 4y ago
  That was my experience too. I inherited a non-trivial Delphi project in the mid-to-late '90s and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I could be productive in it. To be fair, I did have a Pascal class in college. Never thought I'd see it again, but it paid off. Can't say the same for COBOL, once I left Andersen Consulting and its aerospace & defense clients.
olliej 4y ago
It's object pascal, dating to before there were any other object pascals. These days just use free pascal if you want pascal, object or otherwise.[1] The primary historic benefit of Delphi was the vastly superior IDE and UI layout engine (the VCL in general) to most other environments of the era, coupled with apparently very good integration with oracle DBs (where it gets its name)[2]. I'm not super convinced those arguments still apply today. [1] Delphi has a few additional bits but mostly just support for the VCL, IDE, etc - in c compilers these would be attributes, whereas Delphi uses language level keywords. [2] There's also compile time I guess, but .NET basically got MS to the same ballpark with C# and VB.net (the latter also making "real" apps in VB possible, though I think the general dismissal of VB < VB.net isn't super fair).
- jonsen 4y ago
  > It's object pascal, dating to before there were any other object pascals. "The language was originally developed by Apple Computer": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Pascal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Pascal
  - olliej 4y ago
    True, I should have been clearer "commercial for PCs" :D Turbo Pascal had some "object" extensions in the last versions, but Delphi was Borland's fully formed object oriented successor to TP.
magicalhippo 4y ago
It's Pascal, but extended a fair bit. It has classes and interfaces (compatible with COM, but not reliant on COM), operator overloading, generics (mostly) and anonymous methods. Implemented a generic Y combinator in it for teh lulz years ago, for example. It can get a bit verbose at times though, the language itself is verbose but the compiler isn't too clever with figuring out the types when it comes to generics, which reduces readability a lot.

Pretty much, with pointers and Objects. Delphi is actually surprisingly easy to learn and the environment allows to put something together very quickly.

ShadowBanThis01 4y ago
That was my experience too. I inherited a non-trivial Delphi project in the mid-to-late '90s and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I could be productive in it. To be fair, I did have a Pascal class in college. Never thought I'd see it again, but it paid off. Can't say the same for COBOL, once I left Andersen Consulting and its aerospace & defense clients.

olliej 4y ago

It's object pascal, dating to before there were any other object pascals. These days just use free pascal if you want pascal, object or otherwise.[1] The primary historic benefit of Delphi was the vastly superior IDE and UI layout engine (the VCL in general) to most other environments of the era, coupled with apparently very good integration with oracle DBs (where it gets its name)[2]. I'm not super convinced those arguments still apply today. [1] Delphi has a few additional bits but mostly just support for the VCL, IDE, etc - in c compilers these would be attributes, whereas Delphi uses language level keywords. [2] There's also compile time I guess, but .NET basically got MS to the same ballpark with C# and VB.net (the latter also making "real" apps in VB possible, though I think the general dismissal of VB < VB.net isn't super fair).

jonsen 4y ago
> It's object pascal, dating to before there were any other object pascals. "The language was originally developed by Apple Computer": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Pascal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Pascal
- olliej 4y ago
  True, I should have been clearer "commercial for PCs" :D Turbo Pascal had some "object" extensions in the last versions, but Delphi was Borland's fully formed object oriented successor to TP.

magicalhippo 4y ago

It's Pascal, but extended a fair bit. It has classes and interfaces (compatible with COM, but not reliant on COM), operator overloading, generics (mostly) and anonymous methods. Implemented a generic Y combinator in it for teh lulz years ago, for example. It can get a bit verbose at times though, the language itself is verbose but the compiler isn't too clever with figuring out the types when it comes to generics, which reduces readability a lot.