[mikewarot]

There are some things that Lazarus/Free Pascal does right:

- It has the most sane strings you'll ever see, you don't have to allocate them, and they can hold gigabytes of text.

- You'll never confuse equality tests = with assignment :=

- It's case insensitive

- It doesn't do macros

- It is one of the fastest compilers available

- It is one of the best GUI builders available

Things it doesn't do right

- Begin/End seems verbose to some people

- Other "standard" pascal systems gave it a bad name

- Historically, Borland et al, priced people out of their products and killed off a loyal use base.