This is the 40th Anniversary of Borland Pascal, an admittedly quirky implementation of Nik Wirth's Pascal language that cut some corners but was very useful..

I started with Borland Pascal on CP/M and for DOS 38 years ago and even wrote a real time executive for it.  At that time, C compiles with a 4 pass compiler for a simple Hello World program took a painful four minutes on our network, but the single pass technology of BP was a matter of seconds, mostly done in RAM.

But it wasn't just the speed that mattered, it has a simplicity to it (very legible), strong type casting, and powerful and safe strings.  I fell in love with it, though I did do a lot of C and assembler too for years.  You had to push the limits of TP and that sluggish 4.7 MHz 8088 cpu.   

Back then Pascal strings were limited to 255 characters (had a one byte length field in the first position).  And that was a real problem we had to work around.

Later versions of BP added long strings, OWL and other windowing libraries for DOS and later Windows.  Then Delphi upended the world that thought Visual Basic was the solution to our needs and taught us about RAD.  I think that was the first  Borland Pascal with modern classes, at least as far as I can remember, prior to that I only remember records, but maybe I'm wrong.

I've been a Delphi lover since version 1.0, with significant changes when Unicode, 32 bit and then 64 bit models were created, then multi OS targeting and VCL and FMX, but with surprisingly consistent compatibility from version to version, code I wrote years ago still compiles and is used in projects to this day.  Few technologies can claim that level of longevity.

I know a lot of people have moved on to 5 different products since then and are never happy about it.

EWB feels like a natural progression to that Delphi legacy.   

While it lacks some features (some out of JavaScript necessity: like pointers, some out of choice), it has some superior features like allowing you to use strings in CASE statements unlike Delphi which is limited to integer-like scalars (enums, integers, etc.).

The similarities to the VCL are stronger than VCL to FMX.  And I prefer the EWB IDE to recent Delphi's.

Thanks for this walk down memory lane.

Erick
EWB Programming Books and Nice Component Library
See my EWB BLOG posts, at:
http://www.erickengelke.com