[lukaslalinsky]

I mostly meant the DOS era, when you accessed hardware directly, there were pretty much no libraries. Further on, if people did not start using C++, Pascal would have to evolve to allow writing the things that were previously done in assembly, and libraries would be done in that language as well. That did not happpen, so C++ won and writing Pascal code was even more complex because you had to brindge the C APIs.

[ikari_pl]

What things that were previously done in assembly do you mean?

I remember Delphi nicely allowed including C++ files and assembly in the project too, so there's that. It is a very wordy language, but apart from the need to separate declarations and implementation, was pretty nice to use, and powerful.

[lukaslalinsky]

Many kinds of byte or bit-level operations. I don't have access to much Turbo Pascal code, but it was always Pascal with a lot of inline assembly for specific things. Just found this using google, for example, https://github.com/nickelsworth/swag/blob/7c21c0da2291fc249b...

This kind of code was pretty typical.