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Delphi is still very much with us, but the FOSS world also has its own, largely compatible, GUI-based Object Pascal environment – and it's worth a look.
Valentine's Day 2025 marked the 30th anniversary of the release of Borland's Delphi, which fused Borland's version of Object Pascal, along with a GUI designer and database access, into a powerful whole. Appearing so early in 1995 meant that Delphi itself predated Windows 95 by just over six months: it started out as a 16-bit tool for Windows 3.1. (32-bit Windows was already a thing – the second release of Windows NT, version 3.5, appeared in late 1994, but it was still a bit niche.) The codename, which after much internal debate became the product name, reflected that it was intended as a local rapid-application-delevelopment tool that helped you to talk to Oracle. //
The Reg joined in when Delphi turned 25, setting it in its historical context. One detail from back then does merit clarification, though: "Object Pascal was Borland's own language." Well, it was – Delphi's compiler was inherited from Borland's Turbo Pascal. As The Reg noted when Turbo Pascal turned 40, TP went OOPS with version 5.5, back in 1989. Borland didn't invent Object Pascal, though.
An Apple report [PDF] from almost exactly a decade before the release of Delphi, by the late great Larry Tesler, explains:
Object Pascal is a revision of Lisa Clascal designed by Apple Computer's Macintosh Software Group with the help of Niklaus Wirth.
Clascal was an older language designed for software development on Apple's first GUI computer, the Lisa. Its reference manual [PDF] from 1983 dates it as older than the Macintosh itself. In 1986, BYTE Magazine explained:
The syntax for Object Pascal was jointly designed by Apple's Clascal team and Niklaus Wirth. the designer of Pascal, who was invited to Apple's Cupertino headquarters specifically for this project. In addition to implementing Object Pascal on the Mac, Apple has put the Object Pascal specification in the public domain and encouraged others to implement compilers and interpreters for it.
Even if Delphi's 30 years puts fancy type-safe newbie Rust's mere 13 years into perspective, Object Pascal itself can thus legitimately claim 40 years. //
