Entry
Delphi: History: What is Borland Delphi?
Nov 16th, 2003 16:29
Knud van Eeden,
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--- Knud van Eeden --- 25 August 2003 - 01:53 am ---------------------
Delphi: History: What is Borland Delphi?
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Delphi is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment (that is a
compiler together with an editor and other utilities all in one graphic
environment) that allows programmers to create Windows programs very
quickly and easily.
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Delphi is a software development environment designed for developing
middle to large scale software.
It is a programming language, a compiler, a GUI designer, an editor, a
pre-written visual component library, a debugger and also contains a
lot of tools.
Delphi can be used in almost every software development in windows or
linux environment, but its most strong sides are database, internet and
GUI (user interfaces). Delphi incorporates all new technologies, like
ActiveX, corba, .net, ADO, etc.
[Internet: source: http://www.allexperts.com/previousqv.asp?
QuestionID=3103271]
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Delphi is the descendant of Turbo Pascal, which was first released in
1983 for the CP/M operating system. Turbo Pascal was ported to MS-DOS
in early 1984. During the early history of the IBM PC, Turbo Pascal was
arguably the most popular language for serious development work--mostly
because it was a real compiler, including the program editor and
everything, that cost $19.95 and would run on a 64k machine. Borland
introduced Turbo Pascal for Windows in 1990. The latest release of
Borland Pascal (as it is now called), not including Delphi, was version
7.0 in late 1992.
The development of Delphi started sometime in 1993. Various beta-test
and prerelease copies have been circulated, including several hundred
"early experience" copies which were given away at the trade show
Software Development '95. Delphi was officially announced in the U.S.
on Feb. 14, 1995, and the first release-level copies were shipped on
Feb. 28.
[Internet: source: http://www.mhn.org/~graham/delphi.html]
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Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of Turbo Pascal, was
also the main creator of Delphi (and recently chief architect
of C# and .NET):
[Internet: see also:
http://windows.oreilly.com/news/hejlsberg_0800.html]
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The Delphi language is powerful (possibly
similar to C++ regarding possibilities within the Windows environment)
and also (very) easy to learn.
It is optimized for writing programs in a Windows environment (use
Borland Kylix if you need to program in Linux).
Once you started programming in Delphi, you might probably not change
quickly to another programming language, because it is so intuitive,
simple to use, and gives results so quickly (typically minutes for
small programs, hours for medium programs, to a (few) day(s) for
prototypes of larger programs).
The basic actions when writing Delphi programs: you put (via drag and
drop) components on a form, change some properties, add some source
code (usually not very much, because a lot of functionality is already
available), change some events (for example what should happen if you
press that button), compile, debug and run it. When you want to
find out things, you usually can get a quick answer via the help (put
your cursor on a component or command and press <F1>).
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All together it is a really incredible ingenious language written and
environment created by one or more very genius people, your opinion
might be.
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Internet: see also:
Pascal and its Successors - Niklaus Wirth
http://www.swissdelphicenter.ch/en/niklauswirth.php
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Borland History: Why the name "Delphi?"
http://bdn.borland.com/article/0,1410,20396,00.html
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