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 prima

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).