brent pascal...did that go the way of Sanskrit?
Not entirely. It was an early structured language, and it had callable functions and procedures, used mostly as a teaching language. It was very verbose, using words like "begin" and "end" instead of the curly braces you see in programs of the C family of languages. Or just indentation, as used in even newer languages.
Turbo Pascal was a version from Borland that was very popular back in the day, because it existed in a single 64K segment on those early Commodore and Apple and CP/M computers. Compiling a program was lightning fast, although they were necessarily quite limited in size. As computers evolved, so did Turbo Pascal, although its name was changed to Delphi.
Schweitzer had used it in its early days, because it was the fastest and easiest way to get Windows programs to market, and at that time every one with a CS degree had learned Pascal in college. As I remember, it even beat Visual BASiC. And, as luck would have it, those early Windows programs were still being used when I worked there. So, although our new software was all being written in C#, I had to learn Delphi, because all of us needed to pitch in and fix bugs or add features now and then. My experience with Turbo Pascal on my Commodore 64 helped a lot.
If you want to start a thread about computer languages, I'll be glad to join you there, but I think we're getting close to invoking the wrath of the moderators for drifting so far off-topic here.
