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Borland Releases Delphi 7
sebmol writes: "Borland has released version 7 of its superb development tool Delphi. Unusual for Borland, they have added quite a few extras to their release such as a complete (!) copy of Kylix 3, Borland's port of Delphi to Linux. The price is somewhat affordable, especially if you can take advantage of their upgrade offers. For the first time since Borland became Borland again (after the Inprise debacle), I can say that I am truly impressed by this company and their products."
...that was included in Borland C++ and Turbo Pascal 7 and some previous version of Delphi ?
Anyone knows ?
Where you could purchase their entire C/C++ compiler suite + assembler + debugging tools for $149US ($169US?). The package came with several thousand pages of excellent documentation spread out over 5 or so books.
Object Pascal r00ls!
Yeah, you'd think so, wouldn't you? However, despite all the copies on my shelf of various versions of the Object Pascal Language Reference published by Borland, the official line is (now) that the language used in the product known as Delphi is and always has been officially called Delphi. Not Object Pascal.
I get a feeling that some lawyer in Scott's Valley got a call from some lawyer in Cupertino last year regarding the trademark to "Object Pascal" or something.
Amazing to think that Delphi 1 was released seven years ago. Here's what Delphi's primum mobile Anders Hejlsberg had to say about Delphi when he left Borland for MS in 1996:
Subj: Anders leaving?
Section: Non Tech-General
To: Richard Salit, 71035,343 Saturday 19 October 1996 0:42:27
From: Anders Hejlsberg (Borland), 76117,2115#61213
As you may have heard, I will be leaving Borland by the end of the month to take a job at Microsoft.
This has not been an easy decision to make, but I have now been with Borland for 13 years, and I feel that it is time for me to try some new challenges.
For those of you worried about Delphi's future, I want to assure you that the product is in the hands of an incredibly competent team of people for whom I harbor the deepest respect.
Back in the old Turbo Pascal days it was possible for one person to write and maintain an entire product. This is no longer the case.
Delphi was built by a team, and I have full confidence in the team's ability to develop and deliver new versions of Delphi. In fact, the Delphi team at this point is almost twice the size it was when we shipped 1.0 in early '95. And Delphi97 is going to be a great product which solves a number of the problems you've been asking us about, such as multi-tier database access and COM/ActiveX support.
When you build a product like Turbo Pascal or Delphi, it is incredibly rewarding to see the enthusiasm of developers and the great applications it's been used to create.
I can't tell you how much I appreciate all of the support you've given over the years.
Anders
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
Another thing that others on /. seem to be missing is that D7 will also ship with a preview version of their Delphi for .NET compiler ( DCCIL - pronounced Diesel ). This compiler will produce native .NET IL code and you will be able to use just as you can C# or VB.NET.
.NET applications, 2 articles have been published on BDN ( http://bdn.borland.com/ ) outlining how the new Delphi.NET compiler works and also how to use Delphi with ASP.NET as native .NET applications/scripts.
.NET machines. But we will have to wait until it ships to be sure.
For who are interested in using Delphi to write
Simple games are already being written with DCCIL and there is talk that applications using DCCIL will be compatible enough to run under the new PocketPC
It was a joke, dude. I actually did purchase a copy of Delphi 4 Professional. But then I got a new job a few years back, primarily to do Delphi development, so now I just use one of my company's licensed copies. I believe in paying for commercial software if it is useful (eg., UltraEdit), just like I believe in using free software if it fills a need (eg., Mozilla).
Hmmm...I'm looking for a new language to play with.
Would like pay-as-you-play a la C++ -- not massive overhead to run the thing if I'm not using features. Java is slow, verbose and has lame generic containers. C++ is nice but huge, complicated, and doesn't have native GC. C lacks GC, good generic containers, and has too weak typing. lisp lacks static typing. sml is a functional language (ick) and type inference sucks.
I'm not touching C# with a ten foot pole on general principle.
Right now, the things I'm thinking about looking at next are eiffel and objective C. I'd really like templating, which I know that you get with eiffel. Anyone have any likes/dislikes about these two?
May we never see th
Since this topic is about Delphi 7, why don't you give Delphi a try. It has strong type checking. It is not huge and complex like C++. Because of the relative simplicity of the language it compiles extremely fast. As for garbage collection (GC), Delphi does not have GC. However, Delphi interfaces are automatically reference counted. If you stick to a pure interface model when programming you pretty much get GC behavior (although personally I don't do that and stick to explicit object creation and destruction).
.NET and C#? Some of them are former Borland employees, most importantly Anders Hejlsberg. Do you know what that means? It means Microsoft may actually get something right for the first time!! (As opposed to Visual C++ and the MFC library, which they got wrong everytime).
What's wrong with C# that you can't touch on principle? Because it is Microsoft? Do you know who are the top designers of
If you don't like Microsoft then fine, but, give GNOME/Mono's version of C# a chance at least. If you program as a hobby then I guess it doesn't matter. But if you program as a profession then I would not just brush off a language backed by a company that has the power and resources to make the language here to stay. You can never be too sure that you won't come across a project that works with C#.
Visual Basic allows the great unwashed masses to develop what passes for applications (the look-and-feel of a number of applications written in it suggests there is some merit in the Slashdot consensus that programming needs a steeper learning curve). But for Visual Basic to work, you have to learn a programming language with the consistency of the user interface to Word, and while you can develop components for Visual Basic in almost any language, you are the mercy of Visual Studio wizards to navigate the incredible Rube Goldberg that is COM.
I am interested in the market for widgets for data acquistion and signal processing, which for better or worse is on the Microsoft plantation anyway (Data Translation has dropped support for Mac or anything other than Windows), and if this .NET thing lives up to its promise, there is no reason to be tied to stuff like LabView.
The drip, drip part is while Delphi 7 appears to be joining the .NET party, it is not clear to me how experimental/beta-test the .NET part is and if Delphi and COM is any guide, it may be Delphi 10 before Borland is done with dinking around with their .NET support to get it to their liking.
The Borland press release is also so mired in buzzwords that I am also afraid that Delphi is becoming this hodge podge (lets see, there is VCL, and then there is CLX, which is pointedly not VCL, and beyond that there are these wizards for generating ActiveX controls, which you should be able to generate from any VCL control but I have never gotten to work just right with any of my VCL controls, and now there is Diesel/DCCIL, which introduces a whole raft of deprecations of your existing code base which was the whole reason for sticking with Delphi in the first place).
Delphi, the language, is actually very nice for people wanting to get a job done. The problem with Dephi is that it's non-portable. It only runs on and generates code for 32-bit x86 machines. You can't run it on anything else. This was not a problem if you only wanted to write Windows code. Now you can write Windows and Linux x86 code. You can't make SPARC, PowerPC, MIPS, ARM or any other code with it for that matter. You're still tied to x86, but now you have the choice of Linux or Windows.
Stick Men
I used to use Eiffel on NeXtStep computers. Nice, eh? Sweet ass OS. Well, anyways, Eiffel was fantastic and it is completely OOP from the start. It had wonderful templates and the debugging was top notch. The problem that I had was that the debugging was verbose, but unless I spent a ton of time trying to decrypt what it was trying to tell me, I would just end up trying to look through the code myself. This was back in 1996, so I am sure that things have changed and improved. Sorry, I can't give you any further advice, my memories of Eiffel are not too specific, except for the fact that I fell in love with it and was very sad to see it go. Objective C is very, very cool from what I have heard, but I can't help you at all on that. Do you have a Mac? You could easily give both of these languages a try without any troubles at all and see what you like. I have heard that the Apple IDE is absolutely fantastic and you will fall in love with it right away. Peace. Eiffel was very nice.
Unusual for Borland, they have added quite a few extras to their release such as a complete (!) copy of Kylix 3, Borland's port of Delphi to Linux.
Having extras included with your Borland purchase isn't strange at all - every time I've purchased a Delphi edition (1, 2 then 5) it came with a whole stack of CDs.
Delphi 5 came with free copies of C++ Builder 3 and JBuilder 2; IIRC it also included a web site tool (can't remember which), a Companion Tools CD (some free stuff and some demos of 3rd party). Way back when Delphi 2 and 3 were released, each came with bundled Delphi 1 for 16bit development.
Borland Delphi 7 Studio will be available during summer 2002 in four editions: Architect, Enterprise, Professional, and Personal. A full Delphi language version of Borland Kylix(TM) 3 ships with Delphi 7 Studio Architect, Enterprise, and Professional editions. Delphi 7 Studio Architect is priced at $3,499, Delphi 7 Studio Enterprise at $2,999, Delphi 7 Studio Professional at $999 and Delphi 7 Personal at $99. Check regional websites for promotional pricing for Delphi 7 Studio. $99 for D7 Personal isn't a bad price at all!
For example:
Delphi or JBuilder Enterprise
Reg: $2999
w/ Discount: $399
Kylix Enterprise
Reg: $1999
w/ Discount: $399 :)
It really is a great price when you figure in all the the features that you get for $400. I know I'll never get use them all, though I'd like to
I seem to recall that Turbo Pascal 5.5 was the first version to include object orientation. That was in 1991, or possibly late 1990.
I guess its official, according to this article, Object Pascal is now called Delphi (see page 11):
"The Object Pascal language is now called the Delphi language. The online Help and documentation have been updated accordingly."
However, the newsgroup (forums.borland.com) for the language is still public.borland.delphi.objectpascal.