Re:Delphi??? (Score 1, Informative)

You mean like +, -, *, /? What about 'and', 'or', 'xor', 'div', or 'mod'? How are those "funky" compared to '==' '&&' '||' '^'? They seem pretty clear and descriptive to me. Perhaps you are referring to APL ;-)? Operator precidence is slightly different than C/C++, C# or Java... but not cripplingly so. In all fairness, Pascal does tend to be a little more verbose, but that is intentional in the design in order to encourage better self-documentation (yes, you should still comment your code!). Other differences include: The semi-colon, ';', is statement separator not a terminator, so there are a few places where it is optional and at least one place where it is illegal. The compiler is single-pass recursive descent. It is blazingly fast (on the order of >1M lines of code/minute on today's hardware). As a matter of fact, we find that the bottle-neck in the compiler is more on the I/O side than the actual compiling/codegen side. The produced code is very well optimized(yes, it *could* be better, but there are time/value tradeoffs being made).

As I write this, work is proceeding to add new language features such as generics (parameterized types), partial classes (class fragments), and some other items considered very "modern" by today's language standards. The Delphi language offers a significant level of source compatibility between the native Win32/ia32 compiler version and the .NET/IL compiler version.