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.
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 (outdated cert)
Extremely poor taste.
BTW Oberon was / is not just a language, but a whole very interesting interactive computing environment.
How so?
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.
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.
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.
There were things that tried to reproduce it like RHIDE I could never quite get on with, but this looks just about perfect.
