G'day from WA

[MikeCornflake]

Delphi still exists with Embarcadero and is used for writing portable programs across multiple platforms but unlike Turbo Pascal which was about $100, Delphi now costs between $2,500-$9,200.

Someone :-)  Awesome name, I've been reading your posts with amusement :-)

And someone has hit my evangelical trigger :-)  Yes, the cost of Delphi is jaw-dropping.  Worse, at least around the time I stopped using it, the quality had dropped significantly.  Can't comment on anything released in the last decade though.  Lazarus, on the other hand, is completely free.  freepascal is an amazing compiler that supports multiple modes, including Turbo Pascal and Delphi.  Lazarus started out life as a D7 clone.  But while both freepascal and lazarus started life as homages to Turbo Pascal/Delphi, they have both become their own thing.  Fully modern cross platform compiler and IDE.  The Lazarus LCL is close enough to the VCL that porting applications is do-able, though I'll admit it's a pain.  For all my own toys, I've re-created the front end in Lazarus, and only ported the back-end code.

What Delphi brings to the party is a rich collection of third party, commercial, libraries.  While I love and still contribute to Lazarus, I desperately miss the DevEx database controls.  The company behind them has gone on record stating they'll not be converting them to LCL...  I also suspect Delphi has a better take on Android/iPhone development, but that's an area I'm only vaguely aware of.