Every time I see a Borland style interface or that weird Pascal syntax, I flash back, and remember that feeling of...something like power; the ability to make the computer do anything you wanted, not just what you could already buy/pirate on disk.
That said, there's a reason I didn't keep using Turbo Pascal once I had access to C and Perl on Linux systems. Some things are better than others, and Turbo Pascal and things like Turbo Pascal are nostalgic, but not exactly good. (Then again, I'm working on games for C64, so nostalgia does things to a body.)
Then of course Delphi came along and made all that true for windows apps too!
So somehow I chime with how your comment starts but have such different memories of how it ends :)
Even the legendary Triton relied on the combination of assembler and Pascal:
Versions 1.0 and 1.5.
After learning C, I quickly switched to C++, alongside Pascal, and stayed on Borland ecosystem until Visual C++ 6.0 came to be, followed by .NET.
On UNIX, C++ was my Typescript for C, as back then there wasn't FreePascal, and most Pascal implementations for UNIX sucked, plain standard Pascal, or P2C.
I also had the pleasure to have a myriad of other programming languages, including Oberon, yes it was rather cool for its time.
The way most modern languages have gone back to Pascal style development feels quite enjoyable.
The most obvious one is type declaration order.
Strong typing, with more explicit casts, to what C devs used to call straightjacket programming on BBS and Usenet discussions.
Striving to go back to toolchains with fast compilation times.
Being able to use high level concepts, while at the same time having the primitves for low level coding, no need for everything is a pointer, when the compiler can take care of it
The spans everyone is talking about nowadays, used to be called open arrays in Extended Pascal and Modula-2.
Arenas, were marked regions, see Mark/Release.
While one can advocate that Rust is more Standard ML, Go, Zig, Odin show clearly how Oberon or Modula-2 would look like with more curly brackets and lowercase keywords.
Probably the greatest mistake was that arrays of different sizes were different types in Pascal. While C had extremely poor support for arrays in comparison with older languages like Fortran, PL/I or Algol 68, Pascal was even worse, because in Standard Pascal it was pretty much impossible to write a library implementing linear algebra algorithms.
Actually in Standard Pascal it was impossible to write any kind of library, because separate compilation was impossible.
Turbo Pascal was a decent programming language, but only because it had a lot of essential extensions over Standard Pascal, including the ability to write multi-file programs.
The languages designed by Wirth have become very well known, because he and others have written some very good books about them for beginners and they were used in teaching in many places, but all of his languages were quite bad in comparison with the languages that he wanted to replace, because he thought that they were too complex, e.g. Algol 68 and Xerox Mesa.
You likely mean Wirth's original Pascal; "Standard Pascal" (i.e. ISO 7185) had support for actual array parameters with different bounds or lengths than the formal parameters ("conformant array parameters"), and there was also separate compilation in a later standard. And the original Modula-2 and Oberon versions supported both, open array parameters and separate compilation. I don't think that the original Wirth or Standard Pascal versions ever were popular. The language's massive popularity during the eigthies was driven by a few distinct, significantly extended dialects (UCSD, Lisa, Mac, VAX and Turbo Pascal, and later Delphi). Wirth himself didn't care about standardization nor industry demands.
It is always used as an example of how bad Pascal used to be.
Yet it always gets forgotten that only lousy UNIX compilers, or some 8 bit implementations, ever did nothing else.
It was created to learn programming, the Python of 1970's, quickly everyone else was using UCSD Pascal and various other extensions (which apparently are always cool when the language happens to be C), which were later standardised under Extended Pascal.
Although, yet again, GNU Pascal is probably the only UNIX compiler that supported it until FreePascal came to be.
Niklaus Wirth designed Modula-2 in 1978, thus still in the same decade as Pascal, exactly for systems programming and large scale software development.
Borland helped spread Apple's Object Pascal, designed with feedback from Niklaus Wirth, beyond Apple ecosystem, to what we foundly remember nowadays.
Yet Standard Pascal has to keep coming up all the time.
Everyone is talking about Ratatui nowadays, go check what Turbo Vision in Turbo Pascal 6 already offered in the world of MS-DOS PCs in the early 1990's, with the IDE as basis to show its capabilities as TUI framework.
You should check out Turbo Rascal (...), but you probably already did.
https://lemonspawn.com/turbo-rascal-syntax-error-expected-bu... (outdated cert)
Recently, reading the Wikipedia article about Z-order curves, I found this link inside the article:
https://hermanntropf.de/media/DBCode_mit_Erlaeuterung.txt
It's a blog post written in 2021, in txt, with ASCII diagrams and Pascal source code. I hope it warms your hearts.
Lazarus does fill that gap but somehow doesn't quite have the same feeling as the original Delphi.
The Free Oberon IDE looks like Turbo Pascal development enviroment from the late 80s and the early 90s. I wonder if it would have the concept of reusable components.
Oberon inherited this despite syntax highlighting starting to get traction in the 80s. But nowadays it places an unneeded toll on the shift and caps lock keys and makes coding a bit more tedious.
Right. But there are evolutions of Oberon without these orthodoxies (e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/oberon or https://github.com/rochus-keller/micron) and a few additional features which make it a really powerful but still lean language.
_Very_ cool, and I know what I'm going to do w/ my son's old rPi3 --- any plans to update for the 5?
It currently works on the 2b, 3b and Zero 2; the latter was my actual target because it is a very nice and still lean board available for ~15$ worldwide at least until 2030, and meets very well with the Oberon philosophy. With models like the 4 or 5 series, the Pi goes more and more away from its original leanness. So, currently I'm trying to migrate the system to the ESP32-P4 platform, which seem like the perfect fit for Oberon system, specifically the Olimex board with a HDMI socket.
There were things that tried to reproduce it like RHIDE I could never quite get on with, but this looks just about perfect.
Extremely poor taste.
BTW Oberon was / is not just a language, but a whole very interesting interactive computing environment.
How so?
If you think that dumb nostalgia about “good old times” and complete ignorance/acceptance of any murders if they are considered state-sanctioned is somehow different in your own country (any country at any time), you must come to conclusion that some people inherently have lesser “quality” than others based on papers that they are given at birth by this or that organisation calling itself a state. Problematic, as they say.
Given the existence of both groups I think just the claim that it’s offensive, without explaining why, is ambiguous and just reacting defensively doesn’t address that.
This whole diversion is off topic and can be seen as a form of bad faith.
This is a false equivalence between those who suffered from USSR and those who are ignorant of the suffering of others. I don't think we should care about feelings of a group who are for whatever reason nostalgic about a genocidal oppressive regime.
Peoples’ feelings about the nations they are born into and told to love from birth are complex and multifaceted. The people I know who grew up in the USSR have both good and bad things to say about it, just like the people I know who grew up in the USA (like me) at the same time (the 1970s-1990s) have both good and bad things to say about it. And that isn’t just about our own experiences growing up in these respective nations, but about learning our birth nations’ true histories, and how closely (or not) the ideals espoused by their founders and politicians and important figures in their histories were reflected in their actions.
Thus I really, truly do believe it’s ambiguous for someone to say, without any further context, that they find an image of a legislature with some screen shots of an IDE placed into it offensive. Is it offensive because it’s referencing a body they consider evil or is it offensive because it’s trivializing a body they consider good? Without context it’s impossible to know, and acting like everyone shares the same context about this is just refusal to engage with the world as it is rather than the world as you’d like it to be.
No. The right analogy is an image of the Reichstag with Nazi banners.
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2026/06/07/study-world-usa-b...
A lot of people might also have coherent reasons to think that analogy applies equally to the US House of Representatives and the US Senate.
That alone makes it very bad taste to use any of the Soviet imagery. I'm not sure why it's even a debatable topic at this point.
[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/games/gog-apologizes-for-emailing-na...