Object Pascal is an object-oriented programming language based on Pascal.
At this stage, it is not important to know exactly what that means, only that Object Pascal is a powerful programming language which is also quite easy to learn, and enables you to write programs in an efficient and structured way.

Pascal was developed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a structured programming language. This meant that programs could be written with the use of procedures (or sub-programs), making them easier to follow and quicker to write. It also removed the reliance on the GOTO statement. The GOTO statement is a jump from one part of the program to another, which made code very messy.

Today, Object Pascal is known as the programming language of Borland Delphi, a popular rapid application development package for Windows, first introduced in 1994. So in theory, using Delphi would be a good place to start. However, with prices for Delphi 2007 starting at £529.00 excluding VAT, it is not exactly cheap!

So how do we get going? Luckily there is a free alternative to Delphi called Lazarus. It is essentially the same as Delphi apart from the fact that it is based on the open source Pascal compiler Free Pascal, which can produce programs for Linux, Mac OS X, Unix, BSD and OS/2 as well as for Windows.

Therefore the following tutorials have been written for use with Lazarus, because the code syntax is almost identical to Delphi.