Object Pascal

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

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