While I can get by in a variety of programming languages, most of my professional coding has been done in Pascal. Those of you who know about such things will therefore not be surprised to learn that I was delighted to see Borland re-launch their “Turbo Pascal” range last week.

I will be writing more about these new products in future. In particular I’m interested in the differences between the packages: do you need the “professional” versions, or can you get by with the free “explorer” versions. There’s also the question as to whether you need plain old Turbo Delphi, or the Turbo Delphi for .NET. Unfortunately, because you can only install one Turbo product per machine, I can’t do a lot of evaluation. I daren’t strip off the existing Delphi environment I have because I have clients to support, and I only have one PC here in the UK that is capable of running the software. (I’ll be looking at virtual machines today.)

In the meantime, Jeff Duntemann (who, like Jerry Pournelle, I find to be a much better writer about technology than a writer of science fiction) has written a nice introductory article about installing the new products. And Nick Hodges of Borland has an excellent series of animated presentations (with audio) explaining the new products to beginners.

Update: The virtual machine software that Duntemann recommends looks very interesting. Unfortunately you need to have your operating system install discs with you in order to use it. Looks like I might end up buying a PC after all.