Delphi History: Why Borland Named Its Pascal Tool Delphi

Borland launched Delphi on 14 February 1995, combining its Object Pascal compiler with a visual form designer, a component library and database access tools. The answer to why Borland named its Pascal tool Delphi is a pun: the product was built to connect to databases, especially Oracle, and in Greek myth the place you went to consult the Oracle was Delphi. What began as an internal codename became the product name.

Origins: from Pascal to Object Pascal

Niklaus Wirth designed Pascal in 1970 as a clean teaching language. In the mid-1980s, Apple needed an object-oriented language for the Lisa and Macintosh, and a team led by Larry Tesler, consulting with Wirth, created Object Pascal around 1985–86. Apple used it for its MacApp framework.

Borland had already made Pascal hugely popular on PCs with Turbo Pascal (1983), written by Anders Hejlsberg. Turbo Pascal 5.5 (1989) added object-oriented extensions, and Borland Pascal 7 followed. When Visual Basic showed in 1991 how productive visual Windows development could be, Borland's answer was to combine that ease with a real compiled, object-oriented language. Hejlsberg was chief architect, and the project was codenamed Delphi.

Why Borland named its Pascal tool Delphi

Client/server database applications were the hottest market in the early 1990s, and Oracle was the leading database. The team's codename joked that if you want to talk to the Oracle, you go to Delphi. Marketing reportedly considered other names, such as "AppBuilder", but the codename had already built goodwill among beta testers and the press, so Borland kept it. The name also helped the product stand apart from the dusty classroom image of Pascal.

Design and key features

• Native compiler: Delphi produced fast stand-alone executables, with no runtime interpreter, unlike Visual Basic at the time.
• VCL (Visual Component Library): an object-oriented wrapper around the Windows API with components you dropped on forms.
• Properties, events and RTTI: published properties appear in the Object Inspector, and forms are stored as .dfm resources.
• Database access through the Borland Database Engine, and later dbExpress and FireDAC.
• Strong typing with Pascal's readability: begin/end blocks, units with interface and implementation sections.

A short Delphi example

program Hello;

{$APPTYPE CONSOLE}

uses
  System.SysUtils;

type
  TGreeter = class
    function Greet(const AName: string): string;
  end;

function TGreeter.Greet(const AName: string): string;
begin
  Result := Format('Hello, %s!', [AName]);
end;

var
  G: TGreeter;
begin
  G := TGreeter.Create;
  try
    Writeln(G.Greet('Delphi'));
  finally
    G.Free;
  end;
end.

The try/finally pattern for freeing objects is a Delphi trademark, since classic Delphi objects are managed manually.

Versions timeline

Borland spun off its developer tools as CodeGear in 2006, and Embarcadero Technologies bought CodeGear in 2008; Embarcadero itself became part of Idera. Recent releases carry names like "Delphi 12 Athens" and ship as part of RAD Studio, alongside C++Builder.

Where Delphi is used today

Delphi has a loyal following in Europe, Brazil and Russia, especially for business and industrial software. Well-known programs written in Delphi include FL Studio, Total Commander, Inno Setup, HeidiSQL and the original Windows client of Skype. The open-source Free Pascal compiler and the Lazarus IDE offer a largely Delphi-compatible environment across Windows, Linux and macOS.

Influence and legacy

Hejlsberg left Borland for Microsoft in 1996, where he worked on Visual J++ and then became lead architect of C#, released in 2000. C# properties, events, delegates and its component model show clear Delphi ancestry, and Hejlsberg later created TypeScript. Delphi also proved that rapid visual development did not have to mean slow, interpreted code. The story of why Borland named its Pascal tool Delphi fits the product well: it was built to talk to databases, and thousands of business applications still rely on it to do exactly that.

Frequently asked questions

Is Delphi a language or an IDE?

Both, depending on context. Delphi is the IDE and toolchain from Embarcadero, while the language is a dialect of Object Pascal that Borland itself began calling "the Delphi language" in the early 2000s. Most developers use the two names interchangeably.

Did Delphi influence C#?

Yes. Anders Hejlsberg, Delphi's chief architect, moved to Microsoft in 1996 and later led the design of C#. Properties, events and the component-oriented design of .NET forms echo Delphi's VCL. C#'s syntax, however, follows the C family rather than Pascal.

Is there a free version of Delphi?

Embarcadero offers a Community Edition with license limits for individuals and small companies. Fully free and open-source alternatives are Free Pascal and the Lazarus IDE, which support much of the Delphi language. Both can build native applications for several platforms.