Pascal Today

Added 31 Jul 2008

Pascal is still used today, both as a powerful educational tool for programming, as well as a viable language for industrial, commercial, scientific, shareware and freeware applications. The Pascal language is available on a number of different platforms, both commercially and through open source.

Platforms

Pascal is available for:
OpenVMS VAX
OpenVMS Alpha
Tru64 Unix
Windows 95/98/ME
Windows NT
Linux
FreeBSD Unix
OS/2
Macintosh

See Table V in the Compilers section for a list of available compilers.

Compilers

Commercial versions of Pascal include Borland Pascal (aka, Turbo Pascal), Delphi, Compaq Pascal, THINK Pascal, and CodeWarrior Pascal. Turbo Pascal and THINK Pascal have not been updated for quite some time; likewise, CodeWarrior Pascal's final update is in progress at the time of this writing. Delphi and Compaq Pascal are both still commercially viable products, with yearly updates and full vendor support. Finally, FreePascal and GNU Pascal are ongoing open source projects, providing versions of Pascal freely available to the public.

Table V below provides a list of the more popular Pascal compilers available. In the "Supports" column, each compiler is rated for how well it adheres to the unextended Pascal standard (PAS) and the Extended Pascal standard (EPAS), and whether it supports the Object Pascal model (OP). For each standard, the compiler is also rated to what extent it supports that standard: Full, Nearly Full, or Partial. In addition to the Object Pascal as defined in the Object Pascal Technical Report, Borland designed a variation of Object Pascal. Compilers which adhere to Borland's Object Pascal model are designated as such.