[ThinkBeat]

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.

[klodolph]

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]

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]

> 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]

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.

[dragonwriter]

> Doesn't "1983" tell you something?

That it was finalized around the same time Turbo Pascal 1.0, which only ran on DOS and CP/M, was released.

> The starndard was late. By that time, it wasn't needed because the only Pascal that was widely used was Borland's.

The ISO standard closely followed the 1974 language description, which served largely the same purpose and had generally the same shortcomings on utility, so that the “interoperable but not useful because following a very limited common description, or useful but not interoperable because of proprietary extensions on top of the common description” predates the ISO standard; the lack of a common labguage spec was never as much of a problem as the focus of the spec.

And, no, by December 1983, Turbo Pascal (released the month before) was not the only Pascal that mattered. Nor would it be later in the 1980s, as Apple's Object Pascal (which influenced later versions of Turbo Pascal) became important.

[ak39]

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.

[Peter5]

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]

I would jump back to fpc/lazarus after twenty years if devexpress supported it.

[ak39]

100%. My projects are DevExpress heavy.

[galangalalgol]

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.

[zem]

I've definitely used turbo c vim themes in the past. a quick Google search brings up https://github.com/caglartoklu/borlandp.vim and some others

[zozbot234]

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.

[ragingrobot]

Probably no one else saw interest to do it? I do remember seeing something similar for emacs.

[pkphilip]

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