Pascal not considered harmful - was Re: Rich kids are into COBOL

[Ian S. King]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 8:40 AM, geneb <geneb at deltasoft.com> wrote:

I think people confuse Turbo Pascal with "standard" Pascal.  Turbo brought
> a LOT to the table that you simply coudln't do with a standardized Pascal
> compiler.  Borland never quit tweaking the language - Object Pascal hit
> with the 5.5 release of Turbo Pascal and that was improved upon even
> further with the 6.0 and 7.0 releases.  When Delphi hit the market in 1995,
> it really blew people away.  Had Borland's management not run the company
> into the ground, Delphi would be a lot more popular than it is today.
> Fortunately they used their last functioning brain cell to spin their
> developer tools off to CodeGear in 2007.  Embarcadero purchased them a
> while after that and have continued to improve upon the product - both
> Delphi and C++ Builder.
>
> ISTR Borland did a lot of 'tweaking' - take a look at Turbo Prolog.  It
sounded cool in the marketing literature, but I could never figure out what
it was really good for.  When I finally learned C&M Prolog a few years
later, I realized that the Borland product was Prolog in little more than
name and keywords.  I also realized that Prolog was in fact very, very cool
and a lot of fun.  -- Ian



-- 
Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS
Ph.D. Candidate
The Information School
University of Washington

There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China."