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> Well 'pure' pascal doesn't even have variable length strings... I
> remember painstaking hours trying to get stuff to compile by adding
> the required number of spaces to all my string parameters (and god
> help you if you wanted to read a string from the console!). No
> forward references, either, so you have to get the order of your
> procedure definitions *exactlly* right. I could go on, but I'm
> breaking into a cold sweat remembering it....
Well, I never worked with anything but Borland's Pascal compilers and
TurboPascal 1.0 (released '83) definitely had no problems with any of this
already IIRC (I might be wrong there though - I only really started
programming Pascal with TP3, '86).
> Didn't they go bust a couple of years ago? I remember the borland
> website started redirecting to a new company name and they stopped
> doing all their old software. They then came back, so presumably
> someone bought them. Or was it just a really abortive attempt to
> change their name?
You REALLY are not up to date then. Well, here's the update ;) :
You are talking about the "Inprise" fiasco, right? That was indeed not a
takeover but a name change. The management that did this was fired and the
company was renamed back to Borland a few years ago (around Delphi 6) and is
profitable ever since although their Pascal-based products are no longer the
main cash cow (although I hear they are also profitable by themselves).
Nowadays Borland JBuilder is the market leader in Java development by a
looooong stretch and has been so for several years.
They also successfully ported the whole Delphi IDE (and compiler) to Linux
in the meantime under the product name of "Kylix" (also contains a C++ IDE
and is also available as a free, slightly feature-reduced SKU with a
GPL-only deployment license) and created a new cross-platform class library
for it which could also be compiled with the Windows flavour. Delphi 7
currently also ships with a preview edition of a Delphi for .NET compiler
which creates MSIL binaries from standard Delphi code. For next spring a
full fledged .NET IDE with multi-language support has been announced. In
this process several enhancements to the Delphi language itself (namespaces,
attributes, nested types, an optional garbage collection, etc.) are
scheduled and in part already present in current compiler versions.
IOW, I'm glad to let you know that both Borland and its Pascal-based
products are indeed more than healthy. :)
Oliver
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