Virtual Pascal - History

History

The compiler was quite popular in the BBS scene, probably because of its OS/2 port and being one of the few affordable multi-target compilers. Also Turbo Pascal had been popular in the BBS scene too, but its successor, Delphi was suddenly for Windows only. Virtual Pascal provided a migration path for existing codebases.

There has been pressure from some users for Virtual Pascal to be made into open-source software. This has not been done, provided the following reasoning:

  • The compiler source is mostly written in Intel assembly which is hard to change and maintain.
  • Part of the run-time library is proprietary to Borland
  • Documentation and help are maintained with expensive proprietary tools
  • There is nobody who fully understands the code. Alan said that some of the deeper areas were no-touch for him (original code by Vitaly)

Read more about this topic:  Virtual Pascal

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.
    Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)

    Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)