Object-oriented technology got off to a false start in the late 1970s when Intel Corp’s ill-fated iAPX-432 32-bit chip set arrived trailing clouds of objectivity, only to node-dive in a welter of unmet promises and a critical shortage of software development tools. IBM never liked to talk about it that way until the AS/400 came along, it never liked the machine much at all – but System/38 was the first major commercial example of an object-oriented architecture. And now object orientation is beginning to penetrate into the mainstream standard computer languages, and at the end of last month two versions of object-oriented Pascal were released by rival language developers Microsoft Corp, Redmond, Washington, and Borland International Inc, Scotts Valley, California. Microsoft’s QuickPascal has a windows-based editor, and is said to be the fastest implementation available, linking programs up to 15% faster than its rival: cost is $99. Borland’s Turbo Pascal (5.5) is more expensive at $150 (or $250 for the professional version), but includes both dynamic and static objects, and (like C++) constructor and destructor key words for initialising and deinitialising objects. Both products take their starting point from Apple’s Object Pascal, and include an integrated debugger and third party support libraries – although Borland claims its debugger works on object code, unlike Microsoft’s source code version.
