Object Pascal
| Paradigm | Imperative, Structured, Object-oriented, Functional (Delphi dialect only), Component-based, Event-driven, Generic |
|---|---|
| Designed by | Initially Apple Computer with input from Niklaus Wirth, and then by Borland International, led by Anders Hejlsberg |
| First appeared | 1986 |
| Typing discipline | static and dynamic (dynamic typing through Variants, array of const and RTTI), strong, safe |
| Filename extensions |
.p, .pp, .pas
|
| Major implementations | |
| Delphi (x86, ARM), Free Pascal (x86, x86-64, PowerPC, ppc64, SPARC, MIPS and ARM), Oxygene (CLI, Java, Native Cocoa), Smart Mobile Studio (JavaScript) | |
| Dialects | |
| Apple, Turbo Pascal, Free Pascal (using objfpc or delphi mode), Delphi, Delphi.NET, Delphi Web Script, Oxygene | |
| Influenced by | |
| Pascal, Simula, Smalltalk | |
| Influenced | |
| C#, Genie, Java, Nim | |
Object Pascal refers to a branch of object-oriented derivatives of Pascal, mostly known as the primary programming language of Embarcadero Delphi.
Object Pascal is an extension of the Pascal language that was developed at Apple Computer by a team led by Larry Tesler in consultation with Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of Pascal. It is descended from an earlier object-oriented version of Pascal called Clascal, which was available on the Lisa computer.
Object Pascal was needed in order to support MacApp, an expandable Macintosh application framework that would now be called a class library. Object Pascal extensions, and MacApp itself, were developed by Barry Haynes, Ken Doyle, and Larry Rosenstein, and were tested by Dan Allen. Larry Tesler oversaw the project, which began very early in 1985 and became a product in 1986.
An Object Pascal extension was also implemented in the Think Pascal IDE. The IDE includes the compiler and an editor with syntax highlighting and checking, a powerful debugger and a class library. Many developers preferred Think Pascal over Apple's implementation of Object Pascal because Think Pascal offered a tight integration of its tools. The development stopped after the 4.01 version because the company was bought by Symantec. The developers then left the project.
Apple dropped support for Object Pascal when they moved from Motorola 68K chips to IBM's PowerPC architecture in 1994. MacApp 3.0, for this platform, was re-written in C++.
In 1986, Borland introduced similar extensions, also called Object Pascal, to the Turbo Pascal product for the Macintosh, and in 1989 for Turbo Pascal 5.5 for DOS. When Borland refocused from DOS to Windows in 1994, they created a successor to Turbo Pascal, called Delphi and introduced a new set of extensions to create what is now known as the Delphi language.
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