Dee also: Programming Languages
Brief History
Pascal was invented by Niklaus Wirth in 1971 as a simplified version of Algol, much as BASIC was designed as an educational primer for Fortran. It was intended to be primarily a teaching tool.
Turbo Pascal arrived around 1983. Turbo Pascal was/is a Pascal compiler, which introduced an IDE. The Borland product was responsible for Microsoft’s dropping of its Pascal compiler, due to the cheapness of the Borland product ($49 compared to $179).
In 1995, Borland released Delphi, a visual IDE, featuring further extensions to Pascal, including Object-Oriented Programming.
Delphi is an incredibly easy to use tool, and for this reason many beginner-level programming courses use it to provide an introduction to programming.
Delphi is also available for Linux through the Kylix IDE. An example of a program developed with Kylix is BNR2.
Links
- Borland.com Download sample code, modules and personal edition of Delphi free from Borland
- Free Pascal Open source Pascal compiler that implements Object Pascal
TakeDown.NET -> “Object-Pascal”