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Comment by dbsmith83 | Hacker News Reader

I used to hack away with Delphi back in the day. I tried getting back into it with Lazarus, but I really find Pascal syntax painful to work with again for some reason. It just has some strange conventions and I feel like I'd have to actually read a book to become proficient. A very different experience than learning, say, Kotlin where I could essentially pick it up knowing other OO languages and having a good IDE

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I also worked with Delphi many moons ago and loved it, therefore also like Lazarus a lot, although I agree Pascal syntax could be made more modern. I recall one day I had to access data packets using the equivalent of C unions; the language allowed them, but the syntax was quite odd. Should one day Lazarus and the LCL be converted to other more popular languages, it would easily become a killer product.

Pascal equivalent of C union is a variable record. Nowadays in Delphi (Free Pascal still doesn't have that) records can be used as classes, with their own members and just like classes, their functionality can be expanded using some sort of inheritance mechanism called "helper". Actually, in Delphi, the only difference between a class object and a record object is that classes allow dynamic allocation while records are instantiated on stack from beginning all the way to the end of the program.

You should try Delphi nowadays, it has plenty of modern languages concepts implemented. Not to mention the compiler speed and the cross platform capability for all OS'es that matter.

I just looked it up. The lowest-priced package is $1,599. A "Free Demo" doesn't interest me. I assume Embarcadero has some really good customers who are very satisfied with what they deliver. But they're not exactly cultivating a new user base with those terms.

Minor terminology correction: "variant record", actually: https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/ref/refsu15.html

And yes, Delphi has a small but loyal following. But personally, I feel more comfortable relying to standardized languages (preferred: ISO) and among those a pick with easily recruitable talent. So I wouldn't recommend a new production development in Delphi myself.

"Records as classes" are different from "variant records". And they do exists in either Delphi and FreePascal. In FreePascal those are called "advanced records". You can get better help on those here: https://wiki.freepascal.org/Record .

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