In the March 2021 edition of the Communications of the ACM there is an article, by Nicklaus Wirth, about the 50th anniversary of Nicklaus Wirth’s Pascal. What started at ETH Zurich (in 1970) was publicized in the article “The programming language pascal” by Wirth in the Acta Informatica Journal in March of 1971.
The programming language pascal
Acta Informatica volume 1, pages 35–63(1971)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00264291
I am very happy to be just a small part of the 50 years of Pascal as a student (I wrote my first Pascal program at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo California in 1972 on a CDC timesharing system), software engineer, Borland employee and member of the Embarcadero developer community.
While I do miss travelling and visiting with developers, I am happy to still be able to program, write and create videos about Delphi and C++Builder as a semi-retired developer here in Ashland Oregon.
To remind me of the importance of Turbo Pascal and Delphi, I have (on the wall in my home office) a framed blow up of the original Turbo Pascal version 1 ad that appeared the November 1983 edition of Byte Magazine.
In case you missed it – here is Marco Cantu’s recent blog post about the 50th anniversary of the Pascal language. https://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/2021-march-50years-pascal.html
It’s so cool that Delphi can still (with very little change) compile and execute Turbo Pascal programs and most Pascal programs from the original Karen Jensen and Nicklaus Wirth “PASCAL User Manual and Report” from 1975.
PASCAL User Manual and Report © 1975
Authors: Jensen, Kathleen, Wirth, Niklaus
https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783540071679
Stay safe everyone!
David I.
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Pascal & Delphi are my whole life , since 13 years old till now, learning and teaching via publishing 28 books and more.than 20 applications.
Happy birthday Pascal….
Very cool. I wrote my first Pascal program in 1981 at UCR. It was UCSD Pascal, and it was love at first byte.
Lovely! I have been using Pascal since the Turbo Pascal 3.x days and have used every version (Turbo/Borland/Pascal Delphi) up to the most recent version. Yes, happy birthday Pascal.
Borland / Inprise / CodeGear / Embarcadero language products have been part of my professional life since the late 1980’s. First Turbo C, then Turbo C++, then Borland C++, then Delphi — which I discovered at the release event in Monterey in 1995. I despised Windows programming for years because it seemed unnecessarily complicated, and focused mainly on embedded stuff built on DOS and embedded OS kits.
When Delphi was released, it hid all of this complex nonsense and made Windows programming far more FUN than tedious. So I slowly switched my focus from embedded systems over to Windows apps.
Today everything NEW is targeting mobile devices and the web, although there’s a TON of old “legacy” stuff from D4-D7 years being maintained. Delphi has officially supported mobile devices for several years now, but most of the industry hasn’t seem to have noticed.
Lately I’m super excited to be working with the amazing technology coming out of TMS Software that lets you build a web app in the regular Delphi IDE. It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to hit the F9 key in the IDE and see your app show up inside of Chrome or Safari!
Their XData and Aurelius products let you build REST servers so easily, and they all leverage the normal Delphi development platform and language.
As a sample case to get familiar with TMS WebCore, I cloned an existing web site someone built with typical web tools; it took me about an hour. People I’ve showed it to said it would typically take them several days to do what I did there using any other contemporary toolsets.
I’m baffled why there’s so little attention on these amazing new directions that Delphi supports by dev shops. All they seem to know today is whatever Microsoft gives them (and eventually takes away). You can still load up D4 projects in the latest IDE, build them, and run them with little if any changes. Try that with anything written for older Microsoft .NET platforms (eg., <V4.0)!
Delphi is still very much alive and able to throw it down with the best tools on the market, and will usually leave them in the dust. It's still the most productive dev platform on the planet as far as I'm concerned. It's time people take another look at it. It's not your Grandfather's TurboPascal by a long shot! 🙂
Still using Pascal (although I much prefer PL/I and REXX on z/OS), but two questions:
1) Where has the museum gone (and with it TP1 / TP3 / TP 5.5)
2) When are you going to follow Microsoft, and make the source of these antique compilers (and maybe even BP 7.01) available? Or are you afraid that someone might turn the TP 1 code into a 64-bit competitor for Delphi 10? 😉
Robert
It would grow a lot faster if the price of Delphi was within reach of the average person.
Check out community edition. If you revenue is below $5000 USD then you may qualify and it is free. Certainly within reach of everyone, and if you have $5000 revenue then you can afford Professional.