Acknowledgments

A book of this scope is never the work of a single mind. We owe debts — intellectual, technical, and personal — to many people and communities.

Niklaus Wirth (1934–2024) created Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon, and a body of work on programming language design and computer science education that has influenced every language designed since. His insistence that programming languages should be simple enough to hold in your head, that clarity matters more than cleverness, and that algorithms and data structures are the twin pillars of computing — these ideas are the foundation on which this book stands. His passing in January 2024 was a loss for the entire field, but his work endures in every Pascal program compiled today and in the design philosophy of every language that values readability. We dedicate this book to his memory.

The Free Pascal Development Team — Florian Klaempfl, Jonas Maebe, and the many contributors who have maintained and extended the Free Pascal compiler since 1993 — deserve immense gratitude. Free Pascal is one of the great achievements of the open-source world: a production-quality compiler supporting over twenty target platforms, with active development spanning three decades. Without Free Pascal, modern Pascal programming would be a commercial-only affair, and this book would not exist.

The Lazarus IDE Development Team — including Mattias Gaertner, Marc Weustink, Michael Van Canneyt, and the broader contributor community — built the open-source RAD environment that makes Part V of this book possible. Lazarus proves every day that open-source tools can rival commercial development environments in capability and reliability.

Marco Cantu has done more than perhaps anyone else to keep Pascal education alive in the modern era. His Object Pascal Handbook (freely available from Embarcadero) is the definitive language reference, and his tireless advocacy for Delphi and Object Pascal has kept the language visible in an industry with a short attention span. His work informed our treatment of Object Pascal throughout Parts III and VI.

Jeff Duntemann generously made Free Pascal from Square One available as a free PDF, providing an accessible introduction that has brought countless beginners to the language. His conversational, encouraging writing style — the sense that he genuinely enjoys teaching and genuinely loves Pascal — was an inspiration for the tone we aimed for in this book.

Embarcadero Technologies continues to develop and support Delphi, keeping commercial Object Pascal development alive and actively pushing the language forward with new features. The ongoing evolution of the Delphi dialect has enriched Object Pascal as a whole.

The Pascal community — on r/pascal, r/delphi, the Free Pascal forums, the Lazarus mailing lists, and the various Pascal Discord servers — is one of the most helpful and welcoming programming communities we have encountered. Questions get thoughtful answers. Beginners are encouraged, not mocked. Legacy is respected without becoming a cage. This community is the reason Pascal is alive, and their collective knowledge has shaped this book in ways large and small.

The open-source contributors who reviewed drafts, tested code examples, reported errors, suggested exercises, and improved the text in hundreds of ways: thank you. This book is licensed CC-BY-SA-4.0 because we believe educational materials should be free and community-improvable. Every pull request, issue report, and forum discussion made the book better.

The authors of the classic Pascal textbooks — Elliot Koffman, Frank Friedman, Doug Cooper, Michael Clancy, Kenneth Bowles, and many others — who created the first generation of Pascal teaching materials in the 1970s and 1980s. Their pedagogical innovations — progressive exercises, structured walkthroughs, common-error galleries — established patterns that every programming textbook since has followed, including this one.

Our readers. If you are holding this book (or scrolling through it on a screen), you chose to learn Pascal in an era when that takes a little courage and a lot of curiosity. That choice says something good about you. We wrote every chapter for you, and we hope you find it was worth your time.

If this book has helped you, the best way to show your appreciation is to help someone else learn. Answer a question on a forum. Contribute to Free Pascal or Lazarus. Teach a friend to program. The Pascal community grows one programmer at a time.