Pascal's heyday is long since past, but it was a powerful programming language that was incredible for building user interfaces in the 90s due to the extensive (and proprietary) libraries associated with products like Borland Delphi. # Notability Pascal was taught in schools and was used for many of the best early TUI and GUI products that I used. One of my favorite TUI apps was [[NDN - Necromancers DOS Navigator#DOS Navigator|DOS Navigator]] when I was still using computers I got out of the dumpster which could only run DOS. It was written in Turbo Pascal. # Modern Pascal ## Lazarus > Lazarus is a Delphi compatible cross-platform IDE for Rapid Application Development. It has variety of components ready for use and a graphical form designer to easily create complex graphical user interfaces. [Lararus](https://www.lazarus-ide.org/) is a Pascal IDE with GUI tools and [[Pascal#Embarcadero Delphi|Delphi]] compatibility/conversion built on top of [[Pascal#Free Pascal|Free Pascal]]. Started in 1999 and actively developed (2023). ## Embarcadero Delphi > Delphi is a general-purpose programming language and a software product that uses the Delphi dialect of the Object Pascal programming language and provides an integrated development environment (IDE) for rapid application development of desktop, mobile, web, and console software,[3] currently developed and maintained by Embarcadero Technologies. [Embarcadero Delphi](https://www.embarcadero.com/products/Delphi) is the direct descendant of the original [[Pascal#Borland Delphi|Borland Delphi]] and [[Pascal#Turbo Pascal|Turbo Pascal]]. ## Free Pascal Website and binary releases are incredibly out of date. But there is active development on Gitlab. https://www.freepascal.org/ https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc # Historical Pascal ## Turbo Pascal [Turbo Pascal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal) was > a software development system that includes a compiler and an integrated development environment (IDE) for the Pascal programming language running on CP/M, CP/M-86, and DOS. It was originally developed by Anders Hejlsberg at Borland, and was notable for its extremely fast compilation. Turbo Pascal, and the later but similar Turbo C, made Borland a leader in PC-based development. \- via [Wikipedia](<[Turbo Pascal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal)>) ## Virtual Pascal [Virtual Pascal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Pascal) was > a free 32-bit Pascal compiler, IDE, and debugger for OS/2 and Microsoft Windows, with some limited Linux support. ## Borland Delphi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Delphi_(software)