Borland Delphi 1.0?
Unfortunately, it uses "standard mode" and does not work in "real mode", so Win16 applications don't run in 8088 machines 😢

Tronix wrote:

Borland Delphi 1.0?
Unfortunately, it uses "standard mode" and does not work in "real mode", so Win16 applications don't run in 8088 machines 😢

Wow, that looks like a great tool, but right now I can't really be bothered to dive deep into Pascal... For my non-retro stuff I'm drowning in Java and SQL. My brain is full 🤣

The languages I am familiar with are C, C++, and BASIC.

Tronix wrote:

Borland Delphi 1.0?
Unfortunately, it uses "standard mode" and does not work in "real mode", so Win16 applications don't run in 8088 machines 😢

Turbo Pascal for Windows (1.0, 1.5) can produce such applications, I believe, but sadly has no RAD IDE. TPW has a checkbox for 286 code..
Speaking of Delphi, version 2.0 also supports Win32s (inofficially). So you actually can compile programs that run on both Windows 3.1 and Windows 10 x64. 😁

The languages I am familiar with are C, C++, and BASIC.

Back in the time C and C++ were the main languages used to write desktop applications (and web didn't exist). You have to learn Windows API. It is not WYSIWYG of course, but excluding Delphi and VisualBasic there is no other way.

Turbo Pascal and Fortran/BASIC (and Clipper) were the languages of the 80s, though.
As far as DOS is concerned, Pascal (+Assembler) was much more relevant than C/C++ ever was.
Pascal was also extremely popular in the intellectual scene (schools, universities, etc.)

Edit: OS writers did use C(++), of course. Because of portability and because they were Geeks.
By contrast, sane people didn't use languages that made them go nuts on their free will. 😉

Edit: On Windows, dBase Fast (aka DBF, dBFast) also allowed for developing GUI applications.
It used XBase, I believe. Another program to write GUI apps was Profan. And FoxPro.

@up - op wants to create applications for Windows - not text mode DOS. That's why TurboPascal and BASIC/Fortran are useless.
However there is another alternative - Borland Turbo Pascal for Windows - but he needs to learn Windows API and the IDE had no debugger support. But thats also a good solution for Win 3.x

+1 for Delphi 1.0. never used that version, but as far as Pascal, yes it's a little awkward but not that bad. You could always write the winsock component you need as a DLL in Delphi and use it with your vb3 application, that way you only have a small portion of your codebase in Pascal

Delphi 1.0 is cool, because it can continue using the old OWL stuff from TPW.. Delphi 2 can also read Delphi 1 projects, on the other hand.

@up - op wants to create applications for Windows - not text mode DOS That's why TurboPascal and BASIC/Fortran are useless.

Yes, I was fully aware of this. Just mentioned it for the sake of completeness. When Win16 was young, lot's of Windows 3.x programs were ported
over using existing code of their author's earlier DOS programs. If you look at it that way, Clipper and Pascal may had some significance still. 😉

winuser_pl wrote:

However there is another alternative - Borland Turbo Pascal for Windows - but he needs to learn Windows API and the IDE had no debugger support. But thats also a good solution for Win 3.x

I heard that Borland Pascal 7 also contained a Windows version, likely a beefed-up version of Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5..
I'm speaking under correction, but I believe that's also was Mod4Win once was compiled with.

Edit: I remember to have taken a video of Turbo Pascal for Windows a while ago.
It's not much, but it gives an impression on how well it runs on old machines (like a 286).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URktiHd30Qo

Edit: Quick edit.

Yes, I was fully aware of this. Just mentioned it for the sake of completeness.

Of course, I omitted that fact intentionally.
You are right, Borland Pascal 7 had an ability to create Win16 executables. But the code editor and debugger were dos applications.
The Pascal system was really fast. That's because Borland Pascal compiler is a single pass, not multipass like C or C++ which was reaaallyyy slooow. Thats why I think Pascal was one of the best solutions back in the DOS time.

Jo22 wrote:

As far as DOS is concerned, Pascal (+Assembler) was much more relevant than C/C++ ever was.
Pascal was also extremely popular in the intellectual scene (schools, universities, etc.)

I would agree about C++, but don't lump C in there - C was indeed very relevant in the DOS age.

Pascal did somewhat well in the 8-bit world (UCSD, a lot of CP/M stuff, etc. - even Turbo Pascal started out as a CP/M product), but was considered more of a teaching aid than a "serious" language for commercial use. This was somewhat unfair, mostly because Wirth's specifications were very bare-bones, so each vendor had to add proprietary extensions to make the language usable.

Early Pascal implementations for the PC didn't do very well, because they were either virtualized/interpreted (UCSD/Pecan), or were simply slow, bloated and expensive compilers (MS/IBM). It was Borland that single-handedly made Pascal relevant on the PC -- Turbo Pascal was capable, fast (compiled to memory), had a friendly IDE from the get-go, and most importantly it was dirt-cheap compared to the usual price range of programming tools in the '80s. It created somewhat of a revolution in the PC language market in general. No other Pascal was able to compete, so on the PC, "Pascal" came to mean pretty much a single vendor: Borland.

C, on the other hand, was a competitive market. Not on the 8-bit machines (several factors about C's design made it a bad fit for those), but on the PC there were several compilers even early on which were considered quite mature. Lattice C was one of the early ones with lots of third-party library support, Microsoft C also came to be very prominent (included tools like CodeView were especially well-regarded), then of course Borland also joined the fray, and Rational Systems with Instant-C, and then Watcom, etc.

So perhaps there wasn't a single C compiler that enjoyed total dominance like Turbo Pascal in the Pascal market, but on the whole C was both relevant and widespread. If you check out contemporary magazine ads, newsletters and such, there was a huge variety of compilers, third-party libraries, and tools available for C under DOS... probably more than those for Turbo Pascal when taken together, in fact.

Edit: OS writers did use C(++), of course. Because of portability and because they were Geeks.
By contrast, sane people didn't use languages that made them go nuts on their free will. 😉

I don't think portability was a huge concern, especially not for OS development and especially before ANSI C was a thing. If it was, that was more in the tools and utilities market, at least around the time when UNIX (specifically XENIX) was kind of a big deal, or was projected to be. The general opinion was that C offered the best of relatively low-level programming (speed/performance) and high-level programming (structural niceties, flexibility). Even games were being written in C... stuff from Digger through Ultima IV to Keen/Wolf3D/Doom, just to name a few.

Personally C++ does make me go nuts, but C doesn't really. Very different beasts. And are you implying that assembly programmers weren't geeks (or at least a little nuts)? 😁