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I think a very early Turbo Pascal was in assembly, but I would find that hard to believe of Delphi.

It isn't that much of a stretch to believe that they kept most of the compiler in assembly. The language itself didn't change that much from Borland/Turbo Pascal 6.0/7.0 to Delphi iirc.

Also, there was a source code leak about a decade ago of Turbo Pascal 6.0 that showed the compiler was still 100% x86 assembly. Just found it via Yandex - it was pretty hard to find with Google. (I only looked at the directory listings of the source code filenames just now, at some sourceforge-like site.)

As a young lad, I studied the internals of BLS Pascal (the great-grandfather of Turbo Pascal) and was blown away by the cleverness of much of the code. I had never seen such clever machine code before and have ever since considered Anders a bit of a genius.

Anders isn't a 'bit of a genius' when it comes to language/runtime design he is straight up one of the geniuses.

I'm 40, I've programmed since 87 and the languages I've truly loved using in the real world have always been Anders languages in some way (TP -> Delphi -> C#/.Net -> TypeScript) - he has amazing taste in what he implements and when - he just has an eye for practical languages that solve common problems nicely.

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