Delphi is a tool of the devil, Object Pascal is horrible and in-consistant.
I would recomend avoiding anything by Borland, they have made too many errors in the terms of reliablility of the compiler to ever be trusted again.
C is a simple language for accessing ports etc.
in Microsoft C++ 6
outp
inp
are the functions used for port control, if your running an NT based windows, have problems accessing the parport from user-mode. The standard way around this is a device driver that changes the Input/Output Permission Bit-Map for that process, to allow access to that port.
This method i first noticed in Dr Dobb's Journel, but a good version based on this principle is here at
**broken link removed**