The Object Pascal programming language we use in Delphi wasn't invented in 1995 along with the Borland visual development environment. It was simply extended from the Object Pascal language already in use in the Borland Pascal products. But Borland didn't invent Pascal, it only helped make it very popular and extended it a little...
Wirth's Pascal
The Pascal language was originally designed in 1971 by Niklaus Wirth, professor at the Polytechnic of Zurich, Switzerland. Pascal was designed as a simplified version for educational purposes of the language Algol, which dates from 1960.
When Pascal was designed, many programming languages existed, but few were in widespread use: FORTRAN, C, Assembler, COBOL. The key idea of the new language was order, managed through a strong concept of data type, and requiring declarations and structured program controls. The language was also designed to be a teaching tool for students of programming classes.
A standard for the language was formulated in 1983 and approved by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). With the growing use of computers, extensions and variations have been added to the language, the most popular of which are UCSD Pascal (developed by University of California at San Diego) and Turbo Pascal (developed by Borland International).
Borland's world-famous Pascal compiler, called Turbo Pascal, was introduced in 1983, implementing "Pascal User Manual and Report" by Jensen and Wirth. The Turbo Pascal compiler has been one of the best-selling series of Pascal compilers of all time, and made the language particularly popular on the PC platform, thanks to its balance of simplicity and power.
Turbo Pascal introduced an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) where you could edit the code (in a WordStar compatible editor), run the compiler, see the errors, and jump back to the lines containing those errors. It sounds trivial now, but previously you had to quit the editor, return to DOS; run the command-line compiler, write down the error lines, open the editor and jump there.
Moreover Borland sold Turbo Pascal for 49 dollars, where Microsoft's Pascal compiler was sold for a few hundred. Turbo Pascal's many years of success contributed to Microsoft's eventual cancellation of its Pascal compiler product.
Delphi's Pascal
After 9 versions of Turbo and Borland Pascal compilers (the last one was Turbo Pascal 7), which gradually extended the language, Borland released Delphi in 1995, turning Pascal into a visual programming language. There is also Turbo51 - Turbo Pascal for 8051 microcontrollers.
Delphi extends the Pascal language in a number of ways, including many object-oriented extensions which are different from other flavors of Object Pascal, including those in the Borland Pascal with Objects compiler.
Borland Pascal is still taught at some secondary, sixth form and university levels, e.g., Malta, at colleges in Germany and the USA, and at secondary schools in Argentina, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Moldova, Romania, Serbia, Libya, Tunisia, France, Vietnam, and Canada. It was the state-approved educational programming language for all South African secondary schools until 2002. Today it continues to be taught in some universities around the world as an introduction to computer programming, usually advancing to C or Java or both.
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