Fwd: Friday finking: IDE 'macro expansions'

[Alan Gauld]

On 18/03/2023 12:15, Peter J. Holzer wrote:

>> I think you might be meaning TurboPascal, Delphi's forerunner. It just
>> had a compiler and text editor.
> 
> I'd still classify Turbo Pascal as an IDE. It wasn't a standalone
> compiler you would invoke on source files you wrote with some other

It had both (although I'm not sure when that was introduced, the
original didn't). Mostly you used the IDE/editor but there was a
command line compiler that you could run (and a make-like project
tool too in the later versions). I started with TurboPascal on DOS
at Uni generating COM files then later used TP versions 4, 5.5(with
added OOP!) and 6 professionally, creating EXE file DOS programs.

Up until I switched to a Mac, a year ago, I still had TP6 and used
it to maintain some old TurboVision DOS programs.

But I used Delphi from version 1 through to 7(?) for all my Windows
programming and still have version 3 installed (via VirtualBox on
Linux) to keep some old shareware apps of mine running.

I often think there are a lot of similarities between
Delphi/Object Pascal and Python in the OOP area.

> it, see the errors directly in the source code. I think it even had a
> debugger which would also use the same editor window (Turbo C did).

I think the debugger came in v3, but i could be wrong. I don't
recall there being one at uni...

> Turbo Pascal predated GUIs, so it wouldn't have a GUI builder. 

No, it did have a windowing toolkit(TurboVision) but no visual UI
builder. That was the big new feature of Delphi.

> application (i.e. not a learning project) with a traditional desktop GUI
> for 20 years) so the presence or absence of a GUI builder isn't an
> essential criterion on whether something is or is not an IDE.

Indeed, but it was intrinsic to Delphi (even though you could
write non GUI apps too, but they required extra effort.)
Eclipse et al have GUI builders available as extras, in Delphi
(and Lazurus) it is hard to avoid.

BTW Delphi (v11) and the other Borland tools are still going strong,
albeit at extortionately high prices: $1000~3000 for the pro
versions!  (But there is still a free community version with
just the basics.) See http://www.embarcadero.com
And it's targeted at multi-platforms now: Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS
although it only runs on Windows.

-- 
Alan G
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/
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