This is a transcript of the interview, conducted in late 2005. Unfortunately, the interview in its original form and the contributions of the other interviewees are no longer available online and all that remains are my answers to the questions which I was able to recover from an old email.

PGD: Pascal has changed a lot since its invention by Niklaus Wirth in 1971, what are your thoughts of the current 'official' standard and the Object Pascal standard brought about by Apple to the update that has been brought about by Borland's Delphi?

I haven't really used anything besides Borland's implementations of the language and the occasional Free Pascal here and there, so I'm probably the wrong person to answer this question. I do believe however, that the language has really evolved into something great. There's a few areas where I'd like to see it evolve some more, for example generics would be a nice addition to the language, but apart from that I'd say Pascal easily matches or exceeds any other language out there when it comes to feature richness.

PGD: Has Object Pascal stood the test of time and does it deserve a place as an officially published standard of the language like that of Extended Pascal?

With all the "standardization" one shouldn't forget that if a ton of developers choose to do something in a particular way, that's a standard, too. If any implementation of Pascal has stood the test of time, it's got to be Object Pascal.

PGD: Now that Free Pascal 2.0 is out do you think that we will see a rise of popularity of the language?

Definitely. I think Free Pascal fills two important gaps, first of all it's the only serious multi-platform compiler for Pascal and secondly, it's more or less the only serious free compiler for Pascal and with version 2.0, I think we'll see a big boost in popularity.

PGD: Where does Pascal rank in the professional market?

I see job offers for Delphi programmers all the time, so my guess is that it's still doing quite well in the professional world. But that's probably mostly due to Delphi's RAD features and the great database support. With the increasing popularity of the .NET platform however, I'd say Borland will lose a whole number of Delphi users to Microsoft.

PGD: How can it grow to become more popular in the market?

The only chance I see for Pascal to become more popular is through real innovation. I'm getting the impression that Pascal is currently heading into a direction, where it's primarily trying to keep up with Microsoft and that way it can only ever win the second place. There's still a lot of room for new ideas and I hope the people working on Pascal right now will make some of them reality.

PGD: How do you think Free Pascal will fair as a competitive game development tool?

I think Free Pascal has the potential to open the console market to independent game developers which again will boost its popularity. To be honest, I don't see how Free Pascal can enter the commercial game development world considering how Delphi has failed to do so (with the exception of a handful of games), but it will defintely become an important tool for independent game developers.

PGD: Do you think that Pascal could make it as an excellent game console language or is this just plain crazy talk?

Again, not in the commercial sector, but definitely for independent projects.

PGD: What are your thoughts on the Free Pascal 2.2.0 Roadmap?

I can't really say anything about that.

PGD: What has been your most positive experience with the Pascal language since you began programming?

Programming in Pascal has been a very positive experience from the start. I don't recall one event in particular that was especially positive, but Pascal in general, the whole community and everything connected to it is just great.

PGD: What do you think of the Free Pascal Mascot? What would you have picked?

I always thought it would be funny to have a Pascal compiler with a wheelbarrow (which some people say Blaise Pascal invented) as its logo, but I think the mascot the Free Pascal guys picked is quite alright.

PGD: What do you feel about the Lazarus IDE project to enable Free Pascal to emulate Delphi?

On the one hand I think it's a great project, but I'm also afraid it might draw people away from Delphi. Why would you pay for something, that you can get for free elsewhere? I'm not saying that Lazarus is exactly as good as the Delphi IDE, and I'm sure a lot of corporate customers would stick to Borland's IDE, even if Lazarus was at par with Delphi, but it's not hard to imagine that a lot of semi-professionals and hobbyists will switch. Of course this ultimately leads to a "commercial software vs. open source" kind of discussion and while I'm pro open source, I really learned to appreciate Borland as a developer of great software and don't want to see Delphi fall into oblivion.

PGD: Will Borland maintain its Kylix software line and its cross-platform component technology, CLX?

Although I hope that they will continue development on Kylix, I don't think that's very realistic. Borland didn't take the cross-platform idea far enough and now, sadly they're paying the price.

PGD: What are your thoughts on Free Pascal 2.0?

I think it's a great piece of software with a bright future ahead of it.

PGD: What are your thoughts on Delphi 2005?

I've only had the chance to look at the personal edition of Delphi 2005, and I'm not too sure about it. Delphi 7 was rock solid, had very few flaws and most importantly, the IDE was really fast. With the release of Delphi 2005, they're following a path that so many software developers are following these days and that is having a load of new features at the cost of performance or stability. I'm sure, however, that they'll sort out these problems in the future and I still think Delphi 2005 is a good product with many cool features that were long overdue.

PGD: Do you have a .NET project planned yet? If so, what is it and what platforms are you looking at?

I'm not working on any .NET projects at the moment.

PGD: If you were to change one thing about any of the Pascal language, what would it be? Would you add or remove something?

The more C I write, the more I learn to appreciate some of its features like the infamous postfix incement operator. But I've always liked Pascal for not promoting sloppy coding, so I wouldn't add any of those to its syntax. As a matter of fact, I like Pascal just the way it is and apart from some enhancements in the field of OOP (such as generics), I don't think it needs to be changed.

PGD: Do you have tools or technologies of choice? What are they?

When I'm coding, I don't really use anything besides Delphi.

PGD: What’s your favorite PC or console game genre?

I don't really have a favorite genre, but my favorite games are Diablo II, StarCraft and recently Half Life 2. So I'd say it's RPG, RTS and FPS (and I'm not just saying that because it sounds funny).

PGD: Who is going to take the lead in the console market with the XBox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Revolution coming out?

I never was a big fan of Nintendo, and the stuff they've produced in recent years can hardly be considered competition for Sony or Microsoft, so they definitely won't take the lead. As for XBox vs. PlayStation: from what I've read, Sony has the better technology but a lot of developers are already working on titles for the XBox so my guess is that we'll have a situation pretty much like the one we have now where we actually have two leaders.

PGD: Is handheld gaming a good way to get into commercial gaming?

As a big fan of old games, I was happy to see that many of the old Amiga, C64 and DOS games had a revival on cell phones. But now that most handheld gaming devices support 3D graphics, I'm pretty sure that developing games for the handheld market will become nearly as tough as developing for PC or consoles. So to answer you question: I think it's just as good or bad a way to get into commercial gaming than through PC or console gaming.

PGD: What is the next project you will create and what tools and languages would you use to develop it?

I'm working on a few projects right now, but sadly, I don't have a lot of time to work on any of them. The biggest project is a bytecode-compiler and virtual machine for my scripting language and all my projects are of course pure Delphi.

PGD: What is your most favorite non-compiler, development tool? Why?

I use Eclipse for the web and XML stuff I do, and it's a really great IDE with a ton of great features - especially the CVS integration.

PGD: What is your least favorite non-compiler, development tool? Why?

I don't think I have a least favorite development tool. I'm very picky about my tools since I tend to get very angry about poor usabiltiy, so any tool I don't like doesn't survive for long on my hard disk.

PGD: So what is next for you and/or your company/group (or the one you work for)?

This is a great time for developers and there's a ton of great new technolgies I want to become more familiar with such as web services, the .NET platform, XSLT, RSS, etc. The real hot topic however is XML and the more I deal with it, the more excited I get about it.

PGD: That’s all! Thanks for your being a part of this interview about our beloved language Pascal.

Conducted on November 11th, 2005 by "WILL" of PascalGameDevelopment.